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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 






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THE 



NEW EDUCATION 



Three Papers 



BY 

/ ' 

GEORGE HERBERT PALMER 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 




BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1887 



l-^ 










Copyright, 1887^ 
By George Herbert Palmer. 



©nt&ersitg ^Pwsb: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambriix;e. 



PREFACE. 



TN this little book I have attempted to 
^ explain to non-professional people some 
recent tendencies in education which have 
been much misunderstood. A mode of 
college discipline which, when rightly em- 
ployed, proves a powerful engine for ma- 
turing the character of students has been 
supposed, both by advocates and oppo- 
nents, to be a contrivance for letting boys 
do as they please. Laissez-faire methods, 
let-alone methods, have been confused in 
many minds with elective methods. To 
clear up this confusion I have exhibited 
here in some detail the safeguards which 
a well-contrived elective system throws 
around its students. I have tried to show 



IV PREFACE. 

the ethical principles on which wise elec- 
tion rests ; and I have drawn attention to 
the special conditions of our time which 
at present render some sort of elective 
system a necessity. I hope such a sur- 
vey will throw light on the question how a 
young student may encounter most safely 
the risks which his transformation into 
manhood involves. The dangers of the 
evolutionary period are great. We are not 
likely to guard against them adequately till 
we see that the opportunity of personal 
choice is a necessary part of the cure, 
as it unquestionably is the cause, of our 
perplexities. 

The three papers which make up the 
book were first published in the "Ando- 
ver Review," in the numbers for Novem- 
ber, 1885, December, 1886, and January, 
1887. They are now printed substantially 
as originally written. Although in time 
of publication so far apart, they form a 
connected series. The first announced a 
thesis which soon met vigorous opposition. 



PREFACE. V 

Some writers directly attacked my views ; 
some described institutions where my 
problems were solved in other, and, as the 
writers believed, in better ways. The more 
important of these antagonistic articles are 
the following : Education New and Old ; 
G. T. Ladd, Andover Review, January, 
1886. The Elective System of the Univer- 
sity of Virginia ; J. M. Garnett, Ibid. 
April. The Group System of Studies in 
the Johns Hopkins University ; D. C. Gil- 
man, Ibid. June. Individualism in Educa- 
tion ; J. H. Denison, Ibid. The Harvard 
^^ New Education;'' G. H. Howison, Ibid. 
The " New Education " at Harvard and 
Yale ; New Englander, March. The Elec- 
tive Policy ; D. H. Chamberlain, Ibid. May. 
The System of Instruction and Government 
at Harvard College ; Samuel Brearley, Jr., 
New York, G. P. Putnam, 1885. Presi- 
dent Eliot's Report ; A. F. West, Indepen- 
dent, May 6, 13, 1886. The Elective Sys- 
tem at the University of Michigan ; W. H. 
Pettee, Nation, May 13, 20, 1886. 



VI PREFACE. 

These articles confirmed my confidence 
in the elective principle, but they also 
convinced me that a much more elaborate 
exposition of it was needed when men so 
earnest and candid as my critics could 
believe that in opposing election they were 
doing education a service. To this supple- 
mentary exposition, and to an examination 
of other possible methods, the last two 
papers are devoted. 

It should always be borne in mind that 
the particular modes of choice described as 
now in use at Harvard are no finalities. 
Undoubtedly they will soon be bettered 
in other colleges ; bettered too, I hope, at 
Harvard every year. Already changes in 
the methods of religious instruction and 
in the marking system have carried vivify- 
ing influences into tracts of college life 
hitherto left sterile. Other changes will 
follow. Special forms do not abide. Yet 
I believe there is a tolerably well deter- 
mined ideal of educated manhood toward 
which most of our colleges are moving. 



PREFACE. Vll 

The perception of this steadfast ideal 
makes many otherwise bewildering changes 
intelligible. To point out what this ideal 
is, and so to purify and strengthen its 
influence, is the object of my writing. 

Cambridge, 

Feb, 21, 1887. 




CONTENTS. 

* 

Page 

The New Education ii 

Possible Limitations of the Elective 

System. 1 50 

Possible Limitations of the Elective 

System. II 107 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 

TOURING the year 1884-85 the Fresh- 
men of Harvard College chose a ma- 
jority of their own studies. Up to that 
time no college, so far as I know, allowed 
its first year's men any choice whatever. 
Occasionally, one modern language has 
been permitted rather than another ; and 
where colleges are organized by *' schools," 

— that is, with independent groups of 
studies each leading to a different degree, 

— the freshman by entering one school 
turns away from others, and so exercises a 
kind of selection. But with these possible 
exceptions, the same studies have always 
been required of all the members of a 
given freshman class. Under the new 



12 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

Harvard rules, but seven sixteenths of the 
work of the freshman year will be pre- 
scribed ; the entire remainder of the 
college course, with the exception of a 
few exercises in English composition, will 
be elective. A fragment of prescribed 
work so inconsiderable is likely in time 
to disappear. At no distant day the Har- 
vard student may mark out for himself 
his entire curriculum from entrance to 
graduation. 

Even if this probable result should not 
follow, the present step toward it is too 
significant to be passed over in silence, for 
it indicates that after more than half a 
century of experiment the Harvard Fac- 
ulty are convinced of the worth of the 
elective system. In their eyes, option is 
an engine of efficiency. People generally 
treat it as a concession. Freedom is con- 
fessedly agreeable ; restive boys like it ; 
let them have as much as will not harm 
them. But the Harvard authorities mean 
much more than this. They have thrown 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 3 

away that established principle of Amer- 
ican education, that every head should con- 
tain a given kind of knowledge ; and 
having already organized their college 
from the top almost to the bottom on a 
wholly different plan, they now declare that 
their new principle has been proved so 
safe and effective that it should supplant 
the older method, even in that year where 
students are acknowledged to be least 
capable of self-direction. On what facts 
do they build such confidence ? What do 
they mean by calling their elective principle 
a system ? Does not the new method, 
while rendering education more agreeable, 
tend to lower its standard ? Or, if it suc- 
ceeds in stimulating technical scholarship, 
is it equally successful in fostering char- 
acter and in forming vigorous and law- 
revering men ? These questions I propose 
to answer, for they are questions which 
every friend of Harvard, and indeed of 
American education, wishes people press- 
ingly to ask. Those most Ukely to ask 



14 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

them are quiet, God-fearing parents, who, 
having bred their sons to a sense of duty, 
expect college life to broaden and consoli- 
date the discipline of the home. These are 
the parents every college wants to reach. 
Their sons, whether rich or poor, are the 
bone and sinew of the land. In my judg- 
ment the new education, once understood, 
will appeal to them more strongly than 
to any other class. But it is not easy to 
understand it. My own understanding of 
it has been of slow growth. When, in 
1870, I left Andover Seminary and came 
to teach at Harvard, I distrusted the more 
extreme developments of the elective sys- 
tem. Up to 1876, I opposed the introduc- 
tion of voluntary attendance at recitations. 
Not until four years ago did I begin to 
favor the remission of Greek in the requi- 
sites for entrance. In all these cases my 
party was defeated; my fears proved 
groundless ; what I wished to accomplish 
was effected by means which I had op- 
posed. I am therefore that desirable per- 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 5 

suader, the man who has himself been 
persuaded. The misconceptions through 
which I passed, I am sure beset others. 
I want to clear them away, and to present 
some of the reasons which have turned me 
from an adherent of the old to an apostle 
of the new faith. 

An elementary misconception deserves 
a passing word. The new system is not a 
mere cutting of straps ; it is a system. Its 
student is still under bonds, bonds more 
compulsive than the old, because fitted 
with nicer adjustment to each one's person. 
On H. M. S. Pinafore the desires of every 
sailor receive instant recognition. The 
new education will not agree to that. It 
remains authoritative. It will not subject 
its student to alien standards, nor treat his 
deliberate wishes as matters of no conse- 
quence ; but it does insist on that author- 
ity which reveals to a man his own better 
purposes and makes them firmer and finer 
than they could have become if directed 
by himself alone. What the amount of a 



1 6 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

young man's study shall be, and what its 
grade of excellence, a body of experts de- 
cides. The student himself determines its 
specific topic. Everybody knows how far 
this is from a prescribed system ; not so 
many see that it is at a considerable re- 
move from unregulated or nomadic study. 
An American at a German university, or 
at a summer school of languages, applies 
for no degree and is under no restraint. 
He chooses whatever studies he likes, ten 
courses or five or one ; he works on them 
as much as suits his need or his caprice ; 
he submits what he does to no test ; he 
receives no mark ; the time he wastes is 
purely his own concern. Study like this, 
roving study, is not systematic at all. It 
is advantageous to adult students, — to 
those alone whose wills are steady, and 
who know their own wants precisely. 
Most colleges draw a sharp distinction 
between the small but important body of 
students of this class — special students, 
as they are called — and the great company 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 7 

of regulars.^ These latter are candidates 
for a degree, are under constant inspec- 
tion, and are moved along the line only as 
they attain a definite standard in both the 
quantity and quality of their work. After 
accomplishing the studies of the freshman 
year, partly prescribed and partly elective, 
a Harvard student must pass successfully 
four elective courses in each of his subse- 
quent three years. By " a course " is un- 
derstood a single line of study receiving 
three hours a v^eek of instruction ; fifty 
per cent of a maximum mark must be won 
in each year in order to pass. Throwing 
out the freshman year, the precise mean- 
ing of the Harvard B. A. degree is there- 
fore this : its holder has presented twelve 
courses of study selected by himself, 
and has mastered them at least half 
perfectly. 

Here, then, is the essence of the elective 
system, — fixed quantity and quality of 

1 In 1884-85 the special students at Harvard, in the 
college proper, numbered seventy. 
2 



1 8 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

Study, variable topic. Work and moderate 
excellence are matters within everybody's 
reach. It is not unfair to demand them of 
all. If a man cannot show success some- 
where, he is stamped ipso facto a worthless 
fellow. But into the specific topic of work 
an element of individuality enters. To 
succeed in a particular branch of study re- 
quires fitness, taste, volition, — incalculable 
factors, known to nobody but the man 
himself. Here, if anywhere, is the proper 
field for choice ; and all American colleges 
are now substantially agreed in accepting 
the elective principle in this sense and ap- 
plying it within the limits here marked 
out. It is an error to suppose that elec- 
tion is the hasty " craze " of a single col- 
lege. Every senior class in New England 
elects a portion of its studies. Every 
important New England college allows 
election in the junior year. Amherst, 
Bowdoin, Yale, and Harvard allow it in 
the sophomore. Outside of New England 
the case is the same. It is true, all the 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 19 

colleges except Harvard retain a modicum 
of prescribed study even in the senior 
year; but election in some degree is ad- 
mitted everywhere, and the tendency is 
steadily in the direction of a wider choice. 
The truth is, Harvard has introduced the 
principle more slowly than other colleges. 
She was merely one of the earliest to be- 
gin. In 1825, on the recommendation of 
Judge Story, options were first allowed, in 
modern languages. Twenty years of ex- 
periment followed. In 1846 electives were 
finally established for seniors and juniors ; 
in 1867 for sophomores ; in 1884 for fresh- 
men. But the old method was abandoned 
so slowly that as late as 1871 some pre- 
scribed study remained for seniors, till 
1879 for juniors, and till 1884 for sopho- 
mores. During this long and unnoticed 
period, careful comparison was made be- 
tween the new and old methods. A mass 
of facts was accumulated, which subse- 
quently rendered possible an extremely 
rapid adoption of the system by other col- 



20 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

leges. Public confidence was tested. Com- 
paring the new Harvard with the old, it is 
plain enough that a revolution has taken 
place ; but it is a revolution like that in 
the England of Victoria, wrought not by- 
sudden shock, but quietly, considerately, 
conservatively, inevitably. Those who have 
watched the college have approved ; the 
time of transition has been a time of un- 
exampled prosperity. For the last fifteen 
years the gifts to the University have 
averaged ^250,000 a year. The steady in- 
crease in students may be seen at a glance 
by dividing the last twenty-five years into 
five-year periods, and noting the average 
number of undergraduates in each: 1861- 
65, 423; 1866-70, 477; 1871-75, 657; 
1876-80, 808; 1881-85, 873. 

These facts are sufficient to show that 
Harvard has reached her present great 
prosperity by becoming the pioneer in 
a general educational movement. What 
made the movement general was the dread 
of flimsy study. Our world is larger than 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 21 

the one our grandfathers inhabited; it is 
more minutely subdivided, more finely re- 
lated, more subtly and broadly known. 
The rise of physical science and the en- 
largement of humanistic interests oblige 
the college of to-day to teach elaborately 
many topics which formerly were not 
taught at all. Not so many years ago a 
liberal education prepared men almost ex- 
clusively for the four professions, — preach- 
ing, teaching, medicine, and law. In the 
first century of its existence one half the 
graduates of Harvard became ministers. 
Of the graduates of the last ten years a full 
third have entered none of the four profes- 
sions. With a narrow field of knowledge, 
and with students who required no great 
variety of training, the task of a college 
was simple. A single programme decently 
covered the needs of all. But as the field 
of knowledge widened, and men began to 
notice a difference between its contents 
and those of the college curriculum, an 
effort was made to enlarge the latter by 



22 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

adding subjects from the former. Modern 
languages crept in, followed by sciences, 
political economy, new departments of his- 
tory, literature, art, philosophy. For the 
most part, these were added to the studies 
already taught. But the length of college 
days is limited. The life of man has not 
extended with the extension of science. 
To multiply subjects was soon found equiv- 
alent to cheapening knowledge. Where 
three subjects are studied in place of one, 
each is pushed only one third as far. A 
crowded curriculum is a curriculum of 
superficialities, where men are forever oc- 
cupied with alphabets and multiplication- 
tables, — elementary matters, containing 
little mental nutriment. Thorough-going 
discipline, the acquisition of habits of intel- 
lectual mastery, calls for acquaintance with 
knowledge in its higher ranges, and there 
is no way of reaching these remoter re- 
gions during the brief season of college 
life except by dividing the field and press- 
ing along paths where personal friction is 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 23 

least. Accordingly, alternative options be- 
gan to be allowed, at first between the new 
subjects introduced, then between these 
and the old ones. Liked or dreaded, op- 
tion was a necessity ; but in its inevitable 
adoption a new principle was introduced 
whose germinal force could not afterwards 
be stayed. The old conception had been 
that there were certain matters a knowl- 
edge of which constituted a liberal edu- 
cation. Compared with the possession of 
these, the temper of the receiving mind 
was a secondary affair. This view became 
untenable. Under the new conditions, 
college Faculties were forced to recognize 
personal aptitudes, and to stake intellec- 
tual gains upon them. In assessing the 
worth of studies, attention was thus with- 
drawn from their subject-matter and trans- 
ferred to the response they called forth in 
the apprehender. Hence arose a new ideal 
of education, in which temper of mind had 
pre-eminence over qucesita^ the guidance of 
the powers of knowing over the store of 



24 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

matters known. The new education has 
accordingly passed through two stages of 
development : first, in order to avoid super- 
ficiality when knowledge was coming in 
like a flood, it was found necessary to ad- 
mit choice ; secondly, in the very necessity 
of this admission was disclosed a more 
spiritual ideal of the relation of the mind 
of man to knowledge. 

And this new ideal, I hold, should now 
commend itself not as a thing good enough 
if collateral, but as a principle, organic and 
exclusive. To justify its dominance a sin- 
gle compendious reason is sufficient : it up- 
lifts character as no other training can, and 
through influence on character it ennobles 
all methods of teaching and discipline. We 
say to our student at Harvard, " Study 
Greek, German, history, or botany, — what 
you will ; the one thing of consequence is 
that you should will to study something." 
The moral factor is thus put forward, where 
it belongs. The will is honored as of prime 
consequence. Other systems treat it as 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 2$ 

a merely concurrent and auxiliar force. 
They try to smuggle it into operation 
wrapped in a mass of matter-of-course per- 
formances. It is the distinctive merit of 
the elective system that it strips off dis- 
guises, places the great facts of the moral 
life in the foreground, forces the student to 
be conscious of what he is doing, permits 
him to become a partaker in his own work, 
and makes him perceive that gains and 
losses are immediately connected with a 
volitional attitude. When such a con- 
sciousness is aroused, every step in knowl- 
edge becomes a step toward maturity. 
There is no sudden transformation, but 
the boy comes gradually to perceive that 
in the determination of the will are found 
the promise and potency of every form of 
life. Many people seem to suppose that at 
some epoch in the life of a young man the 
capacity to choose starts up of itself, ready- 
made. It is not so. Choice, like other 
human powers, needs practice for strength. 
To learn how to choose, we must choose. 



26 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

Keep a boy from exercising his will dur- 
ing the formative period from eighteen to 
twenty-two, and you turn him into the 
world a child when by years he should be 
a man.i To permit choice is dangerous ; 
but not to permit it is more dangerous, for 
it renders dependency habitual, places out- 
side the character those springs of action 
which should be set within it, treats personal 
adhesion as of little account, and through 
anxiety to shield a young life from evil 
cuts it off from opportunities of virile good. 
Even when successful, the directive process 
breeds an excellence not to be desired. 
Plants and stones commit no errors. They 
are under a prescribed system and follow 
given laws. Personal man is in continual 
danger, for to self-direction is attached 
the prerogative of sin. For building up a 
moral manhood, the very errors of choice 
are serviceable. 

1 The average age of the students who entered Har- 
vard last year was eighteen years and ten months. The 
number considerably above or considerably below the 
average is small in every class. 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 2/ 

I am not describing theoretic advantages. 
A manlier type of character actually ap- 
pears as the elective principle extends. 
The signs of the better life are not easy 
to communicate to those who have not 
lived in the peculiar world of a college. A 
greater ease in uprightness, a quicker re- 
sponse to studious appeal, a deeper seri- 
ousness, still keeping relish for merriment, 
a readier amenability to considerations of 
order, an increase of courtesy, a growing 
disregard of coarseness and vice, a decay 
of the boyish fancy that it is girlish to 
show enthusiasm, — tendencies in these di- 
rections, hardly perceptible to others, glad- 
den the watchful heart of a teacher and 
assure him that his work is not returning 
to him void. Every company of young 
men has a notion of what it is "gentle- 
manly " to do. Into this current ideal the 
most artificial and incongruous elements 
enter. Perhaps it is counted " good form " 
to haze a freshman, to wear the correctest 
cut of trousers, to have a big biceps muscle, 



28 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

or to be reputed a man of brains. What- 
ever the notion, it is allegiance to some 
such blind ideal, rather than the acceptance 
of abstract principles of conduct, which 
guides a young man's life. To change 
ever so little these influential ideals is the 
ambition of the educator ; but they are per- 
sistent things, held with the amazing con- 
servatism of youth. When I say that a 
better tone prevails as the elective system 
takes root, I mean that I find the word 
" gentleman," as it drops from student 
mouths, enlarging and deepening its mean- 
ing from year to year, departing from its 
usage as a term of outward description and 
drawing to itself qualities more interior. 
Direct evidence on a matter so elusive can 
hardly be given, but I can throw a few side- 
lights upon it. Hazing, window-smashing, 
disturbing a lecture-room, are things of the 
past. The office of Proctor — the literary 
policeman of the olden time — has become 
a sinecure. Several years ago the Faculty 
awarded Honorable Mention at graduation 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 29 

to students who attained a high rank in three 
or more courses of a single department. 
The honor was not an exalted one, but 
being well within the powers of all it soon 
became "not quite the thing" to gradu- 
ate without it. In the last senior class 
91 men out of 191 received Honorable 
Mention.^ 

This last fact shows that a decent schol- 
arship has become reputable. But more 
than this is true : the rank which is reck- 
oned decent scholarship is steadily rising. 
I would not overstate the improvement. 
The scale of marking itself may have risen 
slightly. But taking the central scholar 
of each class during the last ten years, — 
the scholar, that is, who stands midway 
between the head and the foot, — this 
presumably average person has received 

1 It is often asked whether a young man choosing 
studies for himself will choose them coherently. "Will 
he not scatter among many subjects the attention which 
should be concentrated ? These figures give the answer. 
Nearly half the members of the last senior class chose 
at least three closely related courses. 



30 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 



the following marks, the maximum being 
100 : — 



YEAR. 


1 


\ 

00 


00 
57 
63 
66 

70 


00 

r 
t^ 

00 

56 
65 

(>! 


t 

00 
62 

67 

70 
76 


1 
62 

68 
68 

n 


65 
70 

77 


i 

1 

69 

7S 
75 


f 

64 
69 

72 
79 


4 

f 

63 
68 

72 
81 


Fresh. 


59 
59 


55 
64 

65 
70 


Soph. 


Jun. 


67 


Sen. 


^1 



It will be observed that the marks in 
this table become higher as the student ap- 
proaches the end of his course and reaches 
the years where the elective principle is 
least restricted. Let the eye pass from 
the left upper corner of the table to the 
right lower corner and take in the full sig- 
nificance of a change which has transformed 
freshmen, doomed to prescribed studies and 
half of them ranking below sixty per cent, 
into seniors so energetic that half of them 
win four fifths of a perfect mark in four 
electives. It is not only the poor who are 
affected in this way. About half the men 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 3 1 

who appear on the Rank List each year 
receive no pecuniary aid, and are probably 
not needy men. 

But it may be suspected that high marks 
mean easy studies. The many different 
lines of work cannot be equally severe, and 
it is said that those which call for least ex- 
ertion will be sure to prove the favorites. 
As this charge of ''soft" courses is the 
stock objection to the elective system, I 
shall be obliged to examine it somewhat 
minutely. Like most of the popular ob- 
jections, it rests on an a priori assump- 
tion that thus things must be. Statistics 
all run the other way. Yet I am not sur- 
prised that people believe it. I believed it 
once myself when I knew nothing but pre- 
scribed systems. Under these, it certainly 
is true that ease is the main factor in 
making a study popular. Where choice is 
permitted, the factor of interest gets freer 
play, and exerts an influence that would 
not be anticipated by those who have never 
seen it in operation. Severe studies are 
often highly popular if the subject is at- 



32 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

tractive and the teaching clear. Here is a 
list of the fifteen courses which in 1883-84 
(the last year for which returns are com- 
plete) contained the largest numbers of 
seniors and juniors, those classes being at 
that time the only ones which had no pre- 
scribed studies : Mill's political economy, 
125 seniors and juniors ; European history 
from the middle of the eighteenth century, 
102 ; history of ancient art, 80 ; compara- 
tive zoology, 58 ; political and constitu- 
tional history of the United States, 56 ; 
psychology, 52 ; geology, 47 ; constitu- 
tional government of England and the 
United States, 45 ; advanced geology, with 
field work, 43 ; Homer, sixteen books, 40 ; 
ethics, 38 ; logic, and introduction to phi- 
losophy, 38 ; Shakespeare, six plays, 37 ; 
economic history, advanced course, 36 ; 
legal history of England to the sixteenth 
century, 35. In these years the senior and 
junior classes together contained 404 men, 
who chose four electives apiece. In all, 
therefore, 1,616 choices were made. The 
above list shows 832 ; so that, as nearly as 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 33 

may be, one half of the total work of two 
years is here represented. The other half 
was devoted to interests more special, which 
were pursued in smaller companies. Are 
these choices unwise ? Are they not the 
studies which should largely occupy a young 
man's thoughts toward the close of his col- 
lege life } They are the ones most fre- 
quently set for the senior and junior years 
by colleges which retain prescribed studies. 
From year to year choices differ a little. 
The courses at the lower end of the hst 
may give place to others which do not ap- 
pear here. I print the list simply to indi- 
cate the general character of the studies 
elected. In it appears only one out of 
all the modern languages, and that, too, 
a course in pure literature in which the 
marking is not reputed tender. Another 
year a course of French or German might 
come in ; but ordinarily — except when 
chosen by specialists — the languages, 
modern and ancient, are elected most 
largely during the sophomore year. Fol- 
3 



34 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

lowing directly the prescribed linguistic 
studies of the freshman year, they are de- 
servedly among the most popular, though 
not the easiest, courses. In nearly half the 
courses here shown no text-book is used, 
and the amount of reading necessary for 
getting an average mark is large. A shelf 
of books representing original authorities 
is reserved by the instructor at the Library, 
and the pupil is sent there to prepare his 
work. 

How, it will be asked, are choices so 
judicious secured ? Simply by making 
them deliberate. Last June studies were 
chosen for the coming year. During the 
previous month students were discussing 
with one another what their electives should 
be. How this or that course is conducted, 
what are the peculiarities of its teacher, 
what is the proportion in it between work 
given and gains had, are matters which 
then interest the inhabitants of Hollis 
and Holyoke as stocks interest Wall 
Street. Most students, too, have some 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 35 

intimacy with one or another member of 
the Faculty, to whom they are in the 
habit of referring perplexities. This ad- 
vice is now sought, and often discreetly 
rejected. The Elective Pamphlet is for a 
time the best-read book in college. The 
perplexing question is, What courses to 
give up ? All find too many which they 
wish to take. The Pamphlet of this year 
offers 189 courses, divided among twenty 
departments. The five modern languages, 
for example, offer, all told, thirty-four dif- 
ferent courses : Sanskrit, Persian, Assyrian, 
Hebrew, and Arabic, 14 ; Greek and Latin, 
18 each; natural history, 19; physics and 
chemistry, 18 ; mathematics, 18 ; history 
and philosophy, 12 each ; the fine arts, 
including music, 1 1 ; political economy, 7 ; 
Roman law, 2. These numbers will show 
the range of choice ; on its extent a great 
deal of the efl[iciency of the system de- 
pends.^ After the electives are chosen 

1 But a great deal of the expense also. How much 
larger the staff of teachers must be where everything is 



36 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

and reported in writing to the Dean, the 
long vacation begins, when plans of study 
come under the scrutiny of parents, of the 
parish minister, or of the college graduate 
who lives in the next street. Until Sep- 
tember 21, any elective may be changed 
on notice sent to the Dean. During the 
first ten days of the term, no changes are 
allowed. This is a time of trial, when one 
sees for himself his chosen studies. After- 
wards, for a short time, changes are easy, 
if the instructors consent For the re- 
mainder of the year no change is possible, 
unless the reasons for change appear to 
the Dean important. Other restrictions on 
the freedom of choice will readily be un- 
derstood without explanation. Advanced 
studies cannot be taken till preliminary 
ones are passed. Notices are published 
by the French and German departments 

taught to anybody than where a few subjects are offered 
to all, may be seen by comparing the number of teachers 
at Harvard — 146, instructing 1,586 men — with those 
of Glasgow University in 1878 — 42, instructing 2,018 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 37 

that students who elect those languages 
must be placed where proficiency fits them 
to go. Courses especially technical in 
character are marked with a star in the 
Elective Pamphlet, and cannot be chosen 
till the instructor is consulted. 

By means like these the Faculty try to 
prevent the wasting of time over unprofit- 
able studies. Of course they do not suc- 
ceed. I should roughly guess that a 
quartef, possibly a third, of the choices 
made might be improved. This estimate 
is based on the answers I have received to 
a question put to some fifty recent gradu- 
ates : " In the light of your present ex- 
perience, how many of your electives 
would you change ? " I seldom find a 
man who would not change some ; still 
more rarely one who would change one half. 
As I look back on my own college days> 
spent chiefly on prescribed studies, I see 
that to make these serve my needs more 
than half should have been different. 
There was Anglo-Saxon, for example, 



38 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

which was required of all, no English 
literature being permitted. A course in 
advanced chemical physics, serviceable no 
doubt to some of my classmates, came 
upon me prematurely, and stirred so in- 
tense an aversion to physical study that 
subsequent years were troubled to over- 
come it. One meagre meal of philosophy 
was perhaps as much as most of us seniors 
could digest, but I went away hungry for 
more. I loved Greek, but for two years 
I was subject to the instructions of a 
certain professor, now dead, who was one 
of the most learned scholars and unprofit- 
able teachers I ever knew. Of the studies 
which brought me benefit, few did so in 
any vigorous fashion. Every reader will 
parallel my experience from his own. Pre- 
scribed studies may be ill-judged or ill- 
adapted, ill-timed or ill-taught, but none 
the less inexorably they fall on just and 
unjust. The wastes of choice chiefly 
affect the shiftless and the dull, men who 
cannot be harmed much by being wasted. 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 39 

The wastes of prescription ravage the 
energetic, the clear-sighted, the original, 
— the very classes who stand in greatest 
need of protection. What I would assert, 
therefore, is not that in the elective system 
we have discovered the secret of stopping 
educational waste. That will go on as 
long as men need teaching. I simply hold 
that the monstrous and peculiarly perni- 
cious wastes of the old system are now 
being reduced to a minimum. Select 
your cloth discreetly, order the best tailor 
in town to make it up, and you will still 
require patience for many misfits ; but 
they will be fewer, at any rate, than 
when garments are served out to you and 
the whole regiment by the government 
quartermaster. 

Nobody who has taught both elective 
and prescribed studies need be told how 
the instruction in the two cases differs. 
With perfunctory students, a teacher is 
concerned with devices for forcing his 
pupils onward. Teaching becomes a sec- 



40 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

ondary affair ; the time for it is exhausted 
in questioning possible shirks. Infor- 
mation must be elicited, not imparted. 
The text-book, with its fixed lessons, is a 
thing of consequence. It is the teacher's 
business to watch his pupils, to see that 
they carry off the requisite knowledge ; 
their business, then, it soon becomes to 
try to escape without it. Between teacher 
and scholar there goes on an ignoble game 
of matching wits, in which the teacher is 
smart if he can catch a boy, and the boy 
is smart if he can know nothing without 
being found out. Because of this sup- 
posed antagonism of interests American 
higher education seldom escapes an air 
of unreality. We seem to be at the opera 
bouffe. A boy appears at the learning- 
shop, purchases his parcel of knowledge, 
and then tries to toss it under the counter 
and dodge out of the door before the shop- 
man can be quick enough to make him 
carry off the goods. Nothing can cure 
such folly except insistence that pupil's 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 4 1 

neglect is not teacher's injury. The elec- 
tive system points out to a man that he 
has something at stake in a study, and so 
trains him to look upon time squandered 
as a personal loss. Where this conscious- 
ness can be presumed, a higher style 
of teaching becomes possible. Methods 
spring up unlike formal lectures, unlike 
humdrum recitations. The student ac- 
quires — what he will need in after life 
— the power to look up a single subject 
in many books. Theses are written ; dis- 
cussions held ; in higher courses, prob- 
lems of research supersede defined tasks. 
During 1860-61, fifty-six per cent of the 
Harvard undergraduates consulted the 
college library; during 1883-84, eighty- 
five per cent. 

In a similar way governmental problems 
change their character. Formerly, it was 
assumed that a student who followed his 
own wishes would be indisposed to attend 
recitations. Penalties were accordingly 
established to compel him to come. At 



42 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

present, there is not one of his twelve 
recitations a week which a Harvard stu- 
dent might not "cut." Of course I do 
not mean that unlimited absence is al- 
lowed. Any one who did not appear for 
a week would be asked what he was doing. 
But for several years there has been no 
mechanical regulation, — so much absence, 
so much penalty. I had the curiosity to 
see how largely, under this system of trust, 
the last senior class had cared to stay 
away. I counted all absences, excused 
and unexcused. Some men had been sick 
for considerable periods ; some had been 
worthless, and had shamelessly abused 
their freedom. Reckoning in all mis- 
deeds and all misfortunes, I found that 
on the average each man had been absent 
a little less than twice a week.^ The test 

1 Or sixteen per cent of his recitations. Readers 
may like to compare this result with the number of 
absences elsewhere. At a prominent New England 
college, one of the best of those which require attend- 
ance, a student is excused from ten per cent of his ex- 
ercises. But this amount does not cover absences of 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 43 

of high character is the amount of free- 
dom it will absorb without going to pieces. 
The elective system enlarges the capacity 
to absorb freedom undisturbed. 

But it would be unfair to imply that the 
new spirit is awakened in students alone. 
Professors are themselves instructed. The 
obstacles to their proper work, those sever- 
est of all obstacles which come from de- 
fective sympathy, are cleared away. A 
teacher draws near his class, and learns 
what he can do for it. Long ago it was 
said that among the Gentiles — people 
spiritually rude — great ones exercised au- 
thority, while in a state of righteousness 
this should not be so ; there the leader 
would estimate his importance by his ser- 
viceability. It was a teacher who spoke, 
and he spoke to teachers. To-day teachers' 
dangers lie in the same direction. Always 

necessity, — absences caused by sickness, by needs of 
family, and by the many other perfectly legitimate hin- 
drances to attendance. The percentage given for the 
Harvard seniors includes all absences whatsoever. 



44 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

dealing with inferiors, isolated from criti- 
cism, by nature not less sluggish than 
others, through the honorable passion 
which they feel for their subject disposed 
to set the private investigation of it above 
its exposition, teachers are continually 
tempted to think of a class as if it existed 
for their sakes rather than they for its. 
Fasten pupils to the benches, and nothing 
counteracts this temptation except that in- 
dividual conscience which in all of us is a 
faculty that will well bear strengthening. 
It may be just to condemn the dull, the 
intolerant, the self-absorbed teacher; but 
why not condemn also the system which 
perpetuates him ? Nobody likes to be 
inefficient ; slackness is largely a fault of 
inadvertence. That system is good which 
makes inadvertence difficult and opens the 
way for a teacher to discover whether his 
instructions hit. Give students choice, 
and a professor gets the power to see 
himself as others see him. How this is 
accompl'ished appears by examining three 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 45 

possible cases. Suppose, in the first place, 
I become negligent this year, am busy 
with private affairs, and so content myself 
with imparting nothing, with calling off 
questions from a text-book, or with read- 
ing my old lectures ; I shall find out my 
mistake plainly enough next June, when 
fewer men than usual elect my courses. 
Suppose, secondly, I give my class impor- 
tant matter, but put it in such a form that 
young minds cannot readily assimilate it ; 
the same effect follows, only in this case I 
shall probably attract a small company of 
the hardier spirits, — in some subjects the 
very material a teacher desires. Or sup- 
pose, lastly, I seek popularity, aim at en- 
tertainment, and give my pupils little work 
to do ; my elective becomes a kind of sink, 
into which are drained off the intellectual 
dregs of the college. Other teachers will 
get rid of their loafers ; I shall take them 
in. But I am not likely to retain them. 
A teacher is known by the company he 
keeps. In a vigorous community a " soft " 



46 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

elective brings no honor to its founder. I 
shall be apt to introduce a little stiffening 
into my courses each year, till the appear- 
ance of the proper grade of student tells 
me I am proved to have a value. There 
is, therefore, in the new method a self- 
regulating adjustment. Teacher and taught 
are put on their good behavior. A spirit 
of faithfulness is infused into both, and by 
that very fact the friendliest relation is 
established between them. 

I have left myself little room to explain 
why the elective system should be begun 
as early as the freshman year, and surely 
not much room is needed. A system 
proved to exert a happy influence over 
character, and thence over manners and 
scholarly disposition, is exactly the matur- 
ing agency needed by the freshman of 
eighteen. It is the better suited to him 
because the early years of college life are 
its least valuable portion, which can bear, 
therefore, most economically the disciplin- 
ing losses sure to come when a student is 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 47 

learning to choose. More than this, the 
change from school-methods to character- 
methods is too grave a one to be passed 
over as an incident in the transition from 
year to year. A change of residence 
should mark it. It should stand at the 
entrance to a new career. Parents should 
be warned, and those who have brought 
up their sons to habits of luxurious ease 
should be made fully aware that a college 
which appeals to character has no place for 
children of theirs. Every mode of train- 
ing has its exclusions. I prefer the one 
which brings least profit to our danger- 
ous classes — the indolent rich. Leslie 
Stephen has said that the only .argument 
rascals can understand is the hangman. 
The only inducement to study, for boys of 
loose early life, is compulsion. But for the 
plain democratic many, who have sound 
seed in themselves, who have known duty 
early, and who have found in worthy 
things their law and impulse, the elective 
system, even during the freshman year. 



48 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

gives an opportunity for moral and mental 
expansion such as no compulsory system 
can afford. 

Perhaps in closing I ought to caution 
the reader that he has been listening to a 
description of tendencies merely, and not 
of completed attainment. In no college is 
the New Education fully embodied. It is 
an ideal, toward which all are moving, and 
a powerfully influential ideal. In explain- 
ing it, for the sake of simplicity I have 
confined myself to tracing the working of 
its central principle, and I have drawn my 
illustrations from that Harvard life with 
which I am most familiar. But simplicity 
distorts ; the shadows disappear. I am 
afraid I may seem to have hinted that the 
Harvard training already comes pretty 
near perfection. It does not — let me say 
so distinctly. We have much to learn. 
Side by side with the nobler tendencies to 
which I have directed attention, disheart- 
ening things appear. The examination 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 49 

paper still attacks learning on its intellec- 
tual side, the marking system on its moral. 
All I have sought to establish Is this : 
there is a method which we and many 
other colleges in different degrees have 
adopted, which is demonstrably a sound 
method. Its soundness should by this 
time be generally acknowledged, and criti- 
cism should now turn to the important 
work of bettering its details of operation. 
May what I have written encourage such 
criticism and help to make it wise, pene- 
trative, and friendly. 




POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS OF THE 
ELECTIVE SYSTEM. 



I. 

TN a paper published in the "Andover 
^ Review" of November, 1885, I called 
attention to the fact that a new principle 
is at work in American education. That 
principle, briefly stated, is this : the student 
now consciously shares in his own upbuild- 
ing. His studies are knitted closely to his 
personal life. Under this influence a new 
species of power is developed. Scholarship 
broadens and deepens, boyishness dimin- 
ishes, teacher and pupil meet less artifi- 
cially. The college, as an institution, wins 
fresh life. Public confidence awakens ; 
pupils, benefactions, flow in. Over what 
I wrote an eager controversy has arisen, 
a controversy which must have proved 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 5 1 

instructive to those who need instruction 
most. In the last resort questions of edu- 
cation are decided by educators, as those 
of sanitation by sanitary engineers ; but 
in both cases the decision has reference to 
public needs, and people require to be in- 
structed in the working of appliances which 
are designed for their comfort. There is 
danger that such instruction may not be 
given. Professional men become absorbed 
in their art and content themselves with 
reticence, leaving the public ignorant of 
the devices by which its health is to be 
preserved. A great opportunity, therefore, 
comes to the common householder when 
these professional men fall foul of one 
another. In pressing arguments home they 
frequently take to ordinary speech, and 
anybody who then lends an ear learns of 
the mysteries. The present discussion, I 
am sure, has brought this informatory gain 
to every parent who reads the " Andover 
Review" and has a studious boy. The 
gain will have been greater because of the 



52 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

candor and courtesy with which the attack- 
ing party has delivered its assault. The 
contest has been earnest. Its issues have 
been rightly judged momentous. For good 
or for ill, the choice youth of the land are 
to be shaped by whatever educational policy 
finally wins. Yet, so far as I recall, no 
unkind word has slipped from the pen of 
one of my stout opponents ; no disparage- 
ment of man or college has mixed with the 
energetic advocacy of principle. The dis- 
cussion has set in well toward things. I 
cannot call this remarkable. Of course it 
is not easy to be fair and strong at once. 
Sweetness and light are often parted. Yet 
we rightly expect the scholar's life to civil- 
ize him who pursues it, and we anticipate 
from books a refinement of the spirit and 
the manners as well as the understanding. 
My opponents have been scholars, and have 
spoken as scholars speak. It is a pleasure 
to linger in their kindly contentious com- 
pany. So I gladly accept the invitation of 
the editors of the " Review " to sum up our 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 53 

discussion and to add some explanatory last 
words. 

The papers which have appeared fall 
into two easily distinguishable classes, the 
descriptive and the critical. To the former 
I devote but a brief space, so much more 
direct is the bearing of the latter on the 
main topic of debate, the question, namely, 
what course the higher education can and 
what it cannot now take. Yet the descrip- 
tive papers perform a service and deserve 
a welcome word. Suspecting that I was 
showing off Harvard rather favorably, pro- 
fessors planted elsewhere have attempted 
to make an equally favorable exhibit of 
their own colleges. In my manifesto they 
have seen " a coveted opportunity to bring 
forward corresponding statistics which 
have not been formed under the Harvard 
method." Perhaps this was to mistake my 
aim a little. I did intend to advance my 
college in public esteem ; she deserves that 
of me in everything I write. But primarily 
I thought of myself as the expounder of an 



54 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

important policy, which happens to have 
been longer perceived and more elaborately 
studied at Harvard than elsewhere. I hope 
I did not imply that Harvard, having this 
excellence, has all others. She has many 
weaknesses, which should not be shielded 
from discerning discussion. Nor did I in- 
tend to commit the injustice to Harvard — 
an injustice as gross as it is frequent — 
of treating her as a mere embodiment of 
the elective system. Harvard is a complex 
and august institution, possessed of all the 
attractions which can be lent by age, tra- 
dition, learning, continually renewed re- 
sources, fortunate situation, widespread 
cHentage, enthusiastic loyalty, and forceful 
guidance. She is the intellectual mother 
of us all, honored certainly by me, and I 
believe by thousands of others, for a mul- 
tipHcity of subtle influences which stretch 
far outside her special modes of instruction. 
But for the last half century Harvard has 
been developing a new and important pol- 
icy of education. Coincident with this 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 55 

development she has attained enormous 
popular esteem and internal power. The 
value and limits of this policy, the sources 
of this esteem and power, I wish every- 
body, colleges and populace, to scrutinize. 
To make these things understood is to help 
the higher education everywhere. 

In undertaking this quasi philosophical 
task, I count it a piece of good fortune to 
have provoked so many lucid accounts of 
what other colleges are doing. The more 
of these the better. The public cannot be 
too persistently reminded of the distinctive 
merits of this college and of that. Let 
each be as zealous as possible ; gains made 
by one are gains for all. Depreciatory r 
rivalry between colleges is as silly as it is 
when religious sects quarrel in the midst 
of a perishing world. Probably such rival- / 
ries have their rise in the dull supposition 
that a fixed constituency of pupils exists 
somewhere, which if not turned toward \ 
one college may be drawn to another. As 
the old political economists tell of a " wages 



56 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

fund," fixed and constant in each com- 
munity, so college governors are apt to 
imagine a public pupil-hoard, not suscep- 
tible of much increase or diminution, 
which may by inadvertence fall into other 
hands than their own. In reality each 
college creates its constituency. Its stu- 
dents come, in the main, from the inert 
mass of the uncollegiate public. Only one 
in eight among Harvard students is a son 
of a Harvard graduate ; and probably the 
small colleges beget afresh an even larger 
percentage of their students. On this 
account the small colleges ha\^e been a 
power in the land. To disparage them 
shall never be my office. In a larger de- 
gree than the great universities they spread 
the college idea among people who would 
not otherwise possess it. The boy who 
lives within fifty miles of one of them re- 
flects whether he will or will not have a 
college training. Were there no college in 
the neighborhood, he might never consider 
the matter at all. It is natural enough for 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 57 

undergraduates to decry every college ex- 
cept their own ; but those who love educa- f 
tion generously, and who seek to spread it 
far and wide, cannot afford the luxury of 
envy. One common danger besetting us' 
all should bind us together. In the allure- 
ments of commerce boys may forget that 
college is calling. They do forget it. i 
According to my computations the num- 
ber of persons in the New England colleges 
to-day is about the same as the number in 
the insane asylums ; but little more than 
the number of idiots. Probably this num- 
ber is not increasing in proportion to pop- 
ulation. Professor Newton, of Oberlin, 
finds that the increase of students during 
the ten years between 1870 and 1880, in 
twenty of our oldest leading colleges, was . 
less than three and a half per cent, the 
population of the United States increasing 
during the same period twenty-three per 
cent. In view of facts like these, careful/ 
study of the line along which college 
growth is still possible becomes a neces- 



58 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

sity. It will benefit all colleges alike. No 
one engaged in it has a side to maintain. 
We are all alike seekers. Whatever in- 
structive experience any college can con- 
tribute to the common study, and whatever 
pupils she may thereby gain, will be matter 
for general rejoicing. 

To such a study the second, or critical, 
class of papers furnish important stimulus ; 
for these have not confined themselves to 
describing institutions : they have gone 
on to discuss the value and limits of the 
principle which actuates the new educa- 
tion everywhere. In many respects their 
writers and I are in full accord. In moral 
aim we always are, and generally, too, in 
our estimate of the present status. We 
all confess that the conditions of college 
education have changed, that the field 
of knowledge has enlarged, that a liberal 
training nowadays must fit men for more 
than the four professions of preaching, 
teaching, medicine, and law. We agree 
that the prescribed systems of the past are 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 59 

outgrown. We do not want them. We 
doubt whether they were well suited to 
their own time ; we are sure they will 
never fit ours. Readjustment of curricula, 
we all declare, must be undertaken if the 
higher education is to retain its hold on 
our people. Further still, we agree in the 
direction of this readjustment. My critics, 
no less than I, believe that a widely ex- 
tended scope must be given to individual 
choice. With the possible exception of 
Professor Denison, about whose opinion I 
am uncertain, everybody who has taken 
part in the controversy recognizes the 
elective principle as a beneficial one and 
maintains that in some form or other it 
has come to stay. People generally are 
not aware what a consensus of opinion on 
this point late years have brought about. 
To rid ourselves once for all of further 
controversy let us weigh well the words of 
my opponents. 

Mr. Brearley begins his criticism ad- 
dressed to the New York Harvard Club 



60 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

thus : " We premise that every one ac- 
cepts the elective principle. Some system 
based on that principle must be established. 
No one wants the old required systems 
back, or any new required system." Pro- 
fessor Howison says: "An elective sys- 
tem, in its proper place, and under its 
due conditions, is demonstrably sound." 
Professor Ladd does not express himself 
very fully on this point in the " Andover 
Review," but his opinions may be learned 
from the '' New Englander " for January, 
1885. When, in 1884, Yale College re- 
formed its curriculum and introduced elec- 
tive studies, it became desirable to instruct 
the graduates about the reasons for a step 
which had been long resisted. After a 
brief trial of the new system, Professor 
Ladd published his impressions of it. I 
strongly commend his candid paper to the 
attention of those who still believe the old 
methods the safer. He asserts that "a 
perfect and final course of college study is, 
if not an unattainable ideal, at present an 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 6 1 

impossible achievement." The considera- 
tions which were " the definite and almost 
compulsory reasons for instituting a com- 
prehensive change " he groups under the 
following heads : (i) the need of modern 
languages ; (2) the crowding of studies 
in the senior year ; (3) the heterogeneous 
and planless character of the total course ; 
(4) the need of making allowance for the 
tastes, the contemplated pursuits, and the 
aptitudes of the individual student. Sub- 
stantially, these are the evils of prescrip- 
tion which I pointed out ; only, in my 
view, they are evils not confined to a 
single year. Stating his observation of 
the results of election. Professor Ladd 
says : " Increased willingness in study, and 
even a new and marked enthusiasm on the 
part of a considerable number of students, 
is another effect of the new course already 
realized. The entire body of students in 
the upper classes is more attentive, regular, 
interested, and even eager, than ever be- 
fore." " More intimate and effective rela- 



62 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

tions are secured in many cases between 
teachers and pupils." 

These convictions in regard to the effi- 
ciency which the elective principle lends 
to education are not confined to my critics 
and myself. Let me cite testimony from 
representatives of other colleges. The 
last Amherst Catalogue records (page 24) 
that " excellent results have appeared from 
this [the elective] method. The special 
wants of the student are thus met, his 
zest and progress in his work are increased, 
and his association with his teachers be- 
comes thus more close and intimate." 
President Robinson says, in his annual re- 
port for 1885 to the Corporation of Brown 
University : " There are advantages in a 
carefully guarded system of optional stud- 
ies not otherwise obtainable. The saving 
of time in preparing for a special calling in 
life is something, and the cumulative zeal 
in given lines of study, where a gratified 
and growing taste is ever beckoning on- 
ward, is still more. But above all, some 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 63 

provision for choice among ever-multiplying 
courses of study has become a necessity." 
In addressing the American Institute of 
Instruction at Bar Harbor, July 7, 1886, 
Professor A. S. Hardy, of Dartmouth, is 
reported as saying : " Every educator now 
recognizes the fact that individual charac- 
teristics are always sufficiently marked to 
demand his earliest attention ; and, fur- 
thermore, that there is a stage in the 
process of education where the choice, 
the responsibility, and the freedom of 
the individual should have a wide scope." 
President Adams, in his inaugural ad- 
dress at Cornell in 1885, asserted that 
*' there are varieties of gifts, call them, 
if you will, fundamental differences, that 
make it impossible to train successfully all 
of a group of boys to the same standard. 
These differences are partly matters of 
sheer ability, and partly matters of taste ; 
for if a boy has so great an aversion to a 
given study that he can never be brought 
to apply himself to it with some measure 



64 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

of fondness, he is as sure not to succeed in 
it as he would be if he were lacking the 
requisite mental capacity."^ 

In determining, then, what the new edu- 
cation may wisely be, let this be con- 
sidered settled : it must contain a large 
element of election. That is the opinion 

1 These conditions of intellectual nourishment were 
long ago recognized in other, less formal, departments of 
mental training. In his essays on " Books and Reading " 
President Porter wrote in 1S71 : " The person who asks, 
What shall I read ? or, With what shall I begin ? may 
have read for years in a mechanical routine, and with a 
listless spirit; with scarcely an independent thought, 
with no plans of self-improvement, and few aspirations 
for self-culture. To all these classes the advice is full 
of meaning : ' Read what will satisfy your wants and 
appease your desires, and you will comply with the first 
condition to reading with interest and profit.' Hun- 
ger and thirst are better than manifold appliances and 
directions, in respect to other than the bodily wants, 
towards a good appetite and a healthy digestion. If 
a man has any self-knowledge or any power of self- 
direction, he is surely competent to ask himself what is 
the subject or subjects in respect to which he stands 
most in need of knowledge or excitement from books. 
If he can answer this question, he has gone very far to- 
wards answering the question, ' What book or books can 
I read with satisfaction and profit .'" " (Ch. iv., p. 39.) 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 6$ 

of these unbiased judges. They find 
personal choice necessary for promoting 
a wider range of topics in the college, a 
greater zeal on the part of the student, and 
more suitable relations between teacher 
and pupil. With this judgment I, of 
course, heartily agree, though I should 
make more prominent the moral reason of 
the facts. I should insist that a right 
character and temper in the receiving 
mind is always a prerequisite of worthy 
study. But I misrepresent these gentle- 
men if I allow their testimony to stop here. 
They maintain that the elective principle 
as thus far carried out, though valuable, is 
still meagre and one-sided. They do not 
think it will be found self-sufficing and ca- 
pable of guarding its own working. They 
see that it has dangers peculiar to itself, 
and believe that to escape them it will re- 
quire to be restricted and furnished with 
supplemental influences. I believe so too. 
Choice is important, but it is also impor- 
tant that one should choose well. The 
5 



66 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

individual is sacred, but only so far as he 
is capable of recognizing the sacredness of 
laws which he has had no part in making. 
Unrestricted arbitrary choice is indistin- 
guishable from chaos ; and undoubtedly 
every method of training which avoids 
mechanism and includes choice as a fac- 
tor leaves a door open in the direction 
of chaos. Infinite Wisdom left that door 
open when man was created. To dangers 
from this source I am fully alive. I totally 
dissent from those advocates of the elec- 
tive system who would identify it with a 
laissez-faire policy. The cry that we must 
let nature take care of itself is a familiar 
one in trade, in art, in medicine, in social 
relations, in the religious life, in education; 
but in the long run it always proves inade- 
quate. Man is a personal spirit, a director, 
a being fitted to compare and to organize 
forces, not to take them as they rise, like 
a creature of nature. The future will cer- 
tainly not tolerate an education less or- 
ganic than that of the past; but just as 



THE NEW EDUCATION. G'J 

certainly will it demand that the organic 
tie shall be a living one, — one whose bond 
may assist those whom it restricts to be- 
come spontaneous, forcible, and diverse. 
If I am offered only the alternative of 
absolutism or laissez-faire^ I choose laissez- 
faire. Out of chaotic nature beautiful 
forms do continually come forth. But 
absolutism kills in the cradle. It cannot 
tolerate a life that is imperfect, and so it 
stifles what it should nourish. 

Up to this point my critics and I have 
walked hand in hand. Henceforth we part 
company. I shall not follow out all our 
little divergences. My object from the 
first has been to trace the line along which 
education may now proceed. It must, it 
seems, be a line including election ; but 
election limited how.? To disentangle an 
answer to this vexed question, I pass by 
the many points in which my critics have 
shown that I am foolish, and the few 
others in which I might show them so, 
and turn to the fundamental issue between 



68 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

US, our judgment of what the supplemental 
influences are which will render personal 
initiative safe. Personal initiative is as- 
sured. The authoritative utterances I have 
just quoted show that it can never again 
be expelled from American colleges. But 
what checks are compatible with it ? Ac- 
cepting choice, what treatment will render 
it continually wiser ? Here differences of 
judgment begin to appear, and here I had 
hoped to receive light from my critics. 
The question is one where co-operative ex- 
perience is essential. But those who have 
written against me seem hardly to have 
realized its importance. They generally 
confine themselves to showing how bad 
my plans are, and merely hint at better 
ones which they themselves might offer. 
But what are these plans ? Wise ways of 
training boys are of more consequence 
than Harvard misdeeds. We want to hear 
of a constructive policy which can take a 
young man of nineteen and so train him in 
self-direction that four years later he may 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 69 

venture out alone into a perplexing, and 
for the most part hostile, world. The 
thing to be done is to teach boys how to 
manage themselves. Admit that the Har- 
vard discipline does not do this perfectly 
at present ; what will do it better ? Here 
we are at an educational crisis. We stand 
with this aim of self-guidance in our hands. 
What are we going to do with it .'' It is 
as dangerous as a bomb. But we cannot 
drop it. It is too late to objurgate. It is 
better to think calmly what possible modes 
of treatment are still open. When rail- 
roads were found dangerous, m.en did not 
take to stage-coaches again ; they only 
studied railroading the more. 

Now in the mass of negative criticism 
which the last year has produced I detect 
three positive suggestions, three ways in 
which it is thought limitation may be use- 
fully applied to supplement the inevitable 
personal initiative. These modes of limita- 
tion, it is true, are not worked out with 
any fulness of practical detail, as if their 



70 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

advocates were convinced that the future 
was with them. Rather they are thrown 
out as hints of what might be desirable if 
facts and the pubHc would not interfere. 
But as they seem to be the only conceiv- 
able modes of restricting the elective prin- 
ciple by any species of outside checkage, I 
propose to devote the remainder of this 
paper to an examination of their feasibility. 
In a subsequent paper I shall indicate what 
sort of corrective appears to me more likely 
to prove congruous and lasting. 

The first suggestion is that the elective 
principle should be limited from beneath. 
Universities and schools are to advance 
their grade, so that finally the universities 
will secure three or four years of purely 
elective study, while the schools, in addi- 
tion to their present labors, will take 
charge of the studies formerly prescribed 
by the college. The schools, in short, are 
to become German Gymnasia, and the col- 
leges to delay becoming universities until 
this regeneration of the schools is accom- 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 7 1 

plished.i A certain "sum of topics" is 
said to be essential to the culture of the 
man and the citizen. In the interest of 
church and state, young minds must be 
provided with certain "fact forms," with 
a "common consciousness," a "common 

1 In deference to certain writers I employ their 
favorite term "university" in contrast with the term 
" college," yet I must own I do not know what it means. 
An old signification is clear. A university is an assem- 
blage of schools, as our government is an assemblage of 
States. In England, different corporations, giving sub- 
stantially similar instruction, are brought together by a 
common body which confers the degrees. In this coun- 
try, a group of professional schools — law, medicine, 
theology, and science — are associated through one gov- 
erning body with the college proper, that is, with the 
candidates for the B. A. degree. In this useful sense. 
Tufts and Bowdoin are universities; Amherst and 
Brown, colleges. But Germany, which has thrown so 
many parts of the world into confusion, has introduced 
exaltation and mystery here. A university now appears 
to mean "a college as good as it can be," a stimulating 
conception, but not a finished or precise one. I would 
not disparage it. It is a term of aspiration, good to 
conjure with. When we want to elevate men's ideas, 
or to obtain their dollars, it is well to talk about cre- 
ating a true university: just as it is wise to bid the 
forward-reaching boy to become **a true gentleman." 



72 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

basis of humanism ." Important as personal 
election is, to allow it to take place before 
this common basis is laid is " to strike a 
blow at the historic substance of civiliza- 
tion." How extensive this common con- 
sciousness is to be may be learned from 
Professor Howison's remark that "lan- 
guages, classical and modern ; mathe- 
matics, in all its general conceptions, 
thoroughly apprehended ; physics, acquired 
in a similar manner, and the other natural 
sciences, though with much less of detail ; 
history and politics ; literature, especially 
of the mother tongue, but, indispensably, 
the masterpieces in other languages, par- 
ticularly the classic ; philosophy, in the 
thorough elements of psychology, logic, 
metaphysics, and ethics, each historically 
treated, and economics, in the history of ele- 
mentary principles, must all enter into any 
education that can claim to be liberal." 

The practical objections to this mo- 
narchical scheme are many. I call atten- 
tion to three only. 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 73 

In the first place, the argument on 
which it is based proves too much. If 
we suppose a common consciousness to 
be a matter of such importance, and that 
it cannot be secured except by sameness 
of studies, then that State is criminally 
careless which allows ninety-nine hun- 
dredths of its members to get an individ- 
ual consciousness by the simple expedient 
of never entering college. The theory 
seems to demand that every male — and 
why not female ? — between sixteen and 
twenty be indoctrinated in " the essential 
subject matters," without regard to what 
he or she may personally need to know 
or do. This is the plan of religious teach- 
ing adopted by the Romish Church, which 
enforces its "fact forms" of doctrine on 
all alike ; without securing, however, by 
this means, according to the judgment of 
the outside world, any special freshness 
of religious life. I do not believe the re- 
sults would be better in the higher secu- 
lar culture, and I should be sorry to see 



74 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

Romish methods applied there ; but if 
they are to be applied, let them fall im- 
partially on all members of the commu- 
nity. To put into swaddling clothes the 
man who is wise enough to seek an edu- 
cation, and to leave his duller brother to 
kick about as he pleases, seems a little 
arbitrary. 

But secondly, there is no more prospect 
of persuading our high schools to accept 
the prescribed subjects of the colleges 
than there is of persuading our govern- 
ment to transform itself into the German. 
Already the high schools and the colleges 
are unhappily drawing apart. The only 
hope of their nearer approach is in the 
remission by the colleges of some of the 
more burdensome subjects at present ex- 
acted. Paid for by common taxation, 
these schools are called on to equip the 
common man for his daily struggle. That 
they will one day devote themselves to lay- 
ing the foundations of an ideally best edu- 
cation for men of leisure is grotesquely 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 75 

improbable. Although Harvard draws 
rather more than one third of her stu- 
dents from States outside New Eng- 
land, the whole number of students who 
have come to her from the high schools 
of these States, during a period of the 
last ten years, is but sixty-six. Fitting 
for college is becoming an alarmingly 
technical matter, and is falling largely 
into the hands of private tutors and 
academies. 

It may be said, however, thirdly, that 
it is just these academies which might 
advantageously take the present freshman 
and sophomore studies. They would thus 
become the exclusive avenues to the uni- 
versity of the future, leaving it free to do 
its own proper work with elective studies. 
Considering the great expense which this 
lengthening of the curriculum of the acad- 
emy implies, it is plain that the number 
of schools capable of fitting boys in this 
way would always be small. These few 
academies, with their monopoly of learned 



']6 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

training, would lose their present character 
and be erected into little colleges, — col- 
leges of a second grade. That any such 
thing is likely to occur, I do not believe ; 
but if it were, would it aid the higher edu- 
cation and promote its wide dispersion ? 
Precisely the contrary. Instead of going 
to the university from these academies, 
boys would content themselves with the 
tolerable education already received. For 
the most part they would decline to go 
farther. It is useless to say that this 
does not happen in Germany, where the 
numbers resorting to the university are 
so large as to have become the subject of 
complaint ; for the German government, 
controlling as it does all access to the 
professions, is able to force through the 
Gymnasia and through special courses at 
the university a body of young men who 
would otherwise be seeking their fortunes 
elsewhere. Whether such control would 
be desirable in this country, I will not 
consider. Some questions are not feasi- 



THE NEW EDUCATION. JJ 

ble even for discussion. But it is to Eng- 
lish experience we must look to see what 
our case would be. The great public 
schools of England — Eton, Rugby, Har- 
row, Winchester, Westminster, Chelten- 
ham — are of no higher order than under 
the proposed plan Andover and Exeter 
would become. From these two acade- 
mies nearly ninety-five per cent of the 
senior classes now enter some college. 
But of the young men graduating from 
the English schools named, so far as I 
can ascertain, less than fifty per cent go 
to the university. With the greater pres- 
sure toward commercial life in this coun- 
try, the number would certainly be less 
than in England. To build up colleges 
of a second grade, and to permit none but 
those who have passed them to enter col- 
leges of the first, is to cut off the higher 
education from nearly all those who do 
not belong to the privileged classes ; it is 
to make the *' common consciousness " less 
common, and to turn it, even more effectu- 



y^ THE NEW EDUCATION. 

ally than at present, into the consciousness 
of a clique. He who must make a living 
for himself or for others cannot afford to 
reach his profession late. The age of en- 
tering college is already too high. With 
improved methods of teaching I hope it 
may be somewhat reduced. At any rate, 
every study now added to the high schools 
or academies is a fresh barrier between 
education and the people. 

If, then, by prescribing a large amount 
of study outside the university the elective 
principle is not likely to be successfully 
limited, is it not probable that within 
the college itself the two counter princi- 
ples of election and prescription, mutually 
limiting, mutually supporting, will always 
be retained ? This is the second sug- 
gestion ; to bring studies of choice and 
studies commanded into juxtaposition. 
The backbone of the college is to be 
kept prescribed, the fleshy parts to be 
made elective. By a special modification 
of the plan, the later years are turned 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 79 

largely, perhaps wholly, toward election, 
and a line is drawn at the junior, or even 
the sophomore year, below which elective 
studies are forbidden to penetrate. Is 
not this the plan that will finally be 
judged safest? It certainly is the safest 
for a certain number of years. Before it 
can securely reach anything else, every 
college must pass through this interme- 
diate state. After half a century of test- 
ing election. Harvard still retains some 
prescribed studies. The Harvard juniors 
chose for nineteen years before the sopho- 
mores, and the sophomores seventeen years 
before the freshmen. In introducing elec- 
tives a sober pace is commendable. A 
university is charged with the greatest of 
public trusts. The intelligence of the 
community is, to a large extent, in its 
keeping. It is bound to keep away from 
risky experiments, to disregard shifting 
popular fancies, and to be as conserva- 
tive as clearness of sight will permit. I 
do not plead, therefore, that Harvard and 



80 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

Yale should abolish all prescription the 
coming year. They certainly should not. 
In my opinion, most colleges are moving 
too fast in the elective direction already. 
I merely plead that we must see where 
we are going. As public guides, we must 
forecast the track of the future if we would 
avoid stumbling into paths which lead 
nowhere. That is all I am attempting 
here. I want to ascertain whether the 
dual system of limitation is a stable sys- 
tem, one in which we can put our trust, 
or whether it is a temporary convenience, 
likely to slip away a little year after year. 
What does history say .'* Let us examine 
the facts of the past. The following table 
shows at the left the fifteen New England 
colleges. In the next three parallel col- 
umns is printed the percentage of elective 
studies which existed in these colleges in 
1875-76 ; in the last three, the percentage 
which exists to-day. To render the com- 
parison more exact, I print the sophomore, 
junior, and senior years separately, reserv- 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 



8l 



ing the problem of the freshman year for 
later discussion.^ 





1875-76. 


1885-86. 


Soph. 


Jun. 


Sen. 


Soph. 


Jun. 


Sen. 


Amherst . . 


.04 


.20 


.08 


.20 


•75 


•75 


Bates . . . 




















Boston . . 











•35 


.66 


.82 


Bowdoin . . 











•15 


•25 


•25 


Brown . . 





.04 


.04 


.14 


•37 


•55 


Colby. . . 














.08 


.16 


Dartmouth . 














.41 


•36 


Harvard . . 


•50 


.78 


1. 00 


1. 00 


1. 00 


I. GO 


Middlebury 




















Trinity . . 














•25 


•25 


Tufts . . . 





•17 


■17 





.28 


•43 


Vermont . . 




















Weslevan . 





47 


47 


.16 


47 


.64 


Williams . 

















'37 


Yale . . . 











.13 


•53 


.80 



This table yields four conclusions : (i) A 
rapid and fateful revolution is going on in 

1 It is impossible to show in this table the range of 
choice, that is, the number of studies between which a 
man's selection lies. I wish I could warrant minute 
accuracy in regard to the point which it professes to 
show. Great pains have been spent upon it. Its state- 
ments have been reported to me by an officer of the 
college named, and this report has been subsequently 
verified by catalogue. But only those who have had 
much experience with statistics know how unveracious 
figures can be. 

6 



82 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

the higher education of New England. 
We do not exaggerate the change when 
we speak of an old education and a new. 
(2) The spread of it is in tolerable propor- 
tion to the wealth of the college concerned. 
The new modes are expensive. It is not 
disapproval which is holding the colleges 
back ; it is inability to meet the cost. I 
am sorry to point out this fact. To my 
mind one of the gravest perplexities of the 
new education is the query, What are the 
small colleges to do ? They have a useful- 
ness altogether peculiar ; yet from the life- 
giving modern methods of training they 
are of necessity largely cut off. (3) The 
colleges which long ago foresaw their com- 
ing necessities have been able to proceed 
more cautiously than those which acknowl- 
edged them late. (4) The movement is 
one of steady advance. There is no going 
back. It must be remembered, too, that 
the stablest colleges have been proceeding 
with these changes many more years than 
the period shown in the table. Are we, 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 83 

then, prepared to dismiss prejudice from 
our minds and to recognize what steadiness 
of advance means ? In other matters when 
a general tendency in a given direction is 
discovered, extending over a long series of 
years, visible in individuals widely unlike, 
and presenting no solitary case of back- 
ward turning, we are apt to conclude that 
there is a force in the movement which 
will carry it still further onward. We are 
not disposed to seize on some point in its 
path and to count that an ultimate holding- 
ground. This, I say, would be a natural 
conclusion unless we could detect in the 
movement tendencies at work in an op- 
posite direction. Are there any such 
tendencies here } I cannot find them. 
Prescription invariably loses ; election in- 
variably gains. 

But in order to make a rational predic- 
tion about the future we must know more 
than the bare facts of the past ; we need 
to know why these particular facts have 
arisen. What are the reasons that when- 



84 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

ever elective and prescribed studies are 
mixed, an extrusive force regularly appears 
in the elective ? The reasons are not far 
to seek. Probably every professor in New 
England understands them. The two sys- 
tems are so incongruous that each brings 
out the vices rather than the virtues of its 
incompatible brother. Prescribed studies, 
side by side with elective, appear a bond- 
age ; elective, side by side with prescribed, 
an indulgence. So long as all studies are 
prescribed, one may be set above another 
in the mind of the pupil on grounds of in- 
trinsic worth ; let certain studies express 
the pupil's wishes, and almost certainly 
the remainder, valuable as they may be in 
themselves, will express his disesteem. It 
is useless to say this should not be so. It 
always is. The zeal of work, the freshness 
of interest, which now appear in the chosen 
studies, are deducted from those which are 
forced. On the latter as little labor as 
possible is expended. They become per- 
functory and mechanical, and soon restive 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 85 

pupils and dissatisfied teachers call for fresh 
extension of energizing choice. This is 
why the younger officers in all the colleges 
are eager to give increased scope to the 
elective studies. They cannot any longer 
get first-rate work done in the prescribed. 
Alarmed by the dangers of the new prin- 
ciple, as they often and justly are, they 
find that the presence of prescription, in- 
stead of diminishing the dangers, adds 
another and a peculiarly enfeebling one to 
those which existed before. So certain are 
these dangers, and so inevitable the ex- 
panding power of the elective principle, 
that it is questionable whether it would 
not be wise for a college to refuse to have 
anything to do with elective studies so 
soon as it knows itself too weak to allow 
them to spread. 

For where will this spreading stop } It 
cannot stop till the causes of it stop. The 
table just given shows no likelihood of its 
stopping at all, and a little reflection will 
show that each enlargement increases the 



86 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

reasons for another enlargement still. If 
prescribed studies are ever exceptional, in- 
effective, and obnoxious, they certainly be- 
come more so as they diminish in number. 
A college which retains one of them is in 
a condition of unstable equilibrium. But 
is this true of the freshman year ? Will 
not a special class of considerations keep 
prescription enduring and influential there, 
long after it has lost its usefulness in the 
later years ? A boy of nineteen comes from 
home about as untrained in will as in in- 
telligence. Will it not always be thought 
best to give him a year in which to acquaint 
himself with his surroundings and to learn 
what studies he may afterwards profitably 
select ? Possibly it will. I incline to think 
not. The case of the freshman year is un- 
doubtedly peculiar. Taking a large body 
of colleges, we have direct evidence that 
during their last three years the elective 
principle steadily wins and never loses. 
We have but a trifle of such evidence as 
regards the freshman year. There the 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 8/ 

Struggle of the two forces has barely be- 
gun. It has begun at Harvard, and the 
usual result is already foreshadowed. The 
prescribed studies are disparaged studies ; 
they are not worked at the best advantage. 
Still, I do not like to prophesy on evidence 
so narrow. I will merely say I see no rea- 
son to suppose that colleges will meet with 
permanent success in mingling incompati- 
ble kinds of study in their freshman year. 
But I can only surmise. Let any college 
that inclines to try the experiment do so. 

It may be thought, however, a wiser 
course to keep the freshman year un- 
touched by choice. A solid year of pre- 
scription is thus secured as a limitation 
on the election that is to follow. This 
plan is so often advised, especially by per- 
sons unacquainted with the practical work- 
ing of colleges, that it requires a brief 
examination by itself. 

Let us suppose the revolution which we 
have traced in the sophomore, junior, and 
senior years to have reached its natural ter- 



88 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

minus ; let us suppose that in these years 
all studies have become elective, while the 
freshman year remains completely pre- 
scribed ; the college will then fall into two 
parts, a preparatory department and a uni- 
versity department. In these two depart- 
ments the character of the instruction, the 
methods of study, the consciousness of 
the students, will be altogether dissimi- 
lar. The freshmen will not be taken by 
upper classmen as companions ; they will 
be looked down upon as children. Hazing 
will find abundant excuse. An abrupt line 
will be drawn, on whose farther side free- 
dom will lie, on whose hither side, bond- 
age. The sophomore, a being who at best 
has his peculiarities, will find his sense of 
self-sufficiency doubled. Whatever badly- 
bred boy parents incline to send to college 
will seem to them safe enough for a year, 
and they will suppose that during this 
period he will learn how to behave. Of 
course he will learn nothing of the sort. 
Manly discipline has not yet begun. At 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 89 

the end of the freshman year a boy will be 
only so much less a boy as increase of age 
may make him. Through being forced to 
study mathematics this year there comes 
no sustaining influence fitted to fortify 
the judgment when one is called the next 
year to choose between Greek and German. 
On the contrary, the change from school 
methods to maturing methods is rendered 
as dangerous as possible by allowing it to 
take place quite nakedly, by itself, unsup- 
ported by other changes, and at the mere 
dictation of the almanac. An emancipa- 
tion so bare and sudden is not usual else- 
where. For boys who do not go to college, 
departure from home is commonly recog- 
nized as a fit occasion for putting on that 
dangerous garment, the toga virilis. En- 
trance to the university constitutes a simi- 
lar epoch, when change of residence, new 
companions, altered conditions of living, a 
realization that the old supports are gone, 
and the presumption with which every 
one now meets the youth that he is to be 



90 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

treated as a man among men, become help- 
ful influences co-operating to ease the hard 
and inevitable transition from parental con- 
trol to personal self-direction. A safer time 
for beginning individual responsibility can- 
not be found. At any rate, whether my 
diagnosis of reasons is correct or not, the 
fact is clear, — self-respecting colleges 
do not tolerate preparatory departments. 
They do not work well. They are an ele- 
ment of weakness in the institution which 
harbors them. Even where at first they 
are judged necessary, so soon as the col- 
lege grows strong they are dropped. When 
we attempt to plan an education for times 
to come, we must bear in mind established 
facts. Turn the freshman year into a pre- 
paratory department, fill it with studies 
antithetic in aim, method, and spirit to those 
of later years, and something is established 
which no sober college ever permitted to 
remain long within its borders. This is 
the teaching of the past without an excep- 
tion. To suppose the future will be dif- 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 9 1 

ferent is but the blind hope of a timid 
transitionalism. 

The third suggestion for restricting elec- 
tion is the group system. This deserves a 
more respectful treatment than the methods 
hitherto discussed, for it is something more 
than a suggestion : it is a system, a con- 
structive plan of education, thought out 
in all its parts, and directed toward an in- 
tended end. The definition which I have 
elsewhere offered of the elective system, 
that it demands a fixed quantity and qual- 
ity of study with variable topic, would be 
applicable also to the group system. Ac- 
cordingly it belongs to the new education 
rather than to the old. No less than the 
elective system it is opposed to the methods 
of restriction thus far described. These 
latter methods attempt to limit election by 
the ballast of an alien principle lodged be- 
neath it or by its side. They put a weight 
of prescription into the preparatory schools, 
into the early college years, or into parallel 
lines of study extending throughout the 



92 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

college course. The source of their prac- 
tical trouble lies here : the two princi- 
ples, election and prescription, are nowhere 
united ; they remain sundered and at war, 
unserviceable for each other's defects. The 
group system intertwines them. It per- 
mits choice in everything, but at the same 
time prescribes everything. This it effects 
by enlarging the unit of choice and pre- 
scribing its constituent factors. A group 
or block of studies is offered for choice, not 
a single study. All the studies of a group 
must be taken if any are, the "if" being 
the only matter left for the student to 
settle. The group may include all the 
studies open to a student at the univer- 
sity. One decision may determine his 
entire course. Or, as in the somewhat 
analogous arrangement of the English uni- 
versities, one group may be selected at the 
beginning and another in the middle of the 
university life. The group itself is some- 
times contrived so as to allow an individual 
variation ; different students read different 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 93 

books ; a special phase of philosophy, his- 
tory, or science receives prominence. But 
the boundaries of the group cannot be 
crossed. All the studies selected by the 
college authorities to form a single group 
must be taken ; no others can be. 

In this method of limiting choice there is 
much that is attractive. I feel that attrac- 
tion strongly. Under the exceptional con- 
ditions which exist at the Johns Hopkins 
University, a group system has done excel- 
lent work. Like all the rest of the world, 
I honor that work and admire its wise di- 
rectors. But group systems seem to me 
to possess features too objectionable to 
permit them to become the prevalent type 
of the future, and I do not see how these 
features can be removed without aban- 
doning what is distinctive, and changing 
the whole plan into the elective system, 
pure and simple. The objectionable fea- 
tures connect themselves with the size of 
the unit of choice, with difficulties in the 
construction of the groups, and with the 



94 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

attempt to enforce specialization. But 
these are enigmatic phrases ; let me ex- 
plain them. 

Obviously, for the young, foresight is a 
hard matter. While disciplining them in 
the intricate art of looking ahead, I should 
think it wise to furnish frequently a means 
of repairing errors. Penalties for bad 
choices should not be too severe. Now 
plainly the larger the unit of choice, the 
graver the consequences of erroneous 
judgment. The group system takes a 
large unit, a body of studies ; the simple 
elective system, a small unit, the single 
study. Errors of choice are consequently 
less reparable under the group system 
than under pure election. To meet this 
difficulty the college course at Baltimore 
has been reduced from four years to three ; 
but even so, a student who selects a group 
for which he finds himself unfit cannot 
bring himself into proper adjustment with- 
out the loss of a year. If he does not dis- 
cover his unfitness until the second year 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 95 

has begun, he loses two years. Under the 
elective system, the largest possible pen- 
alty for a single mistake is the loss of a 
single study, one quarter of a year's work. 
This necessary difference in ease of repa- 
rability appears to me to mark an infe- 
riority in group systems, considered as 
methods of educating choice. To the 
public it may seem otherwise. I am often 
astonished to find people approving irrepa- 
rable choices and condemning reparable 
ones. That youths between nineteen and 
twenty-three should select studies for 
themselves shocks many people who look 
kindly enough on marriages contracted 
during those years. Boys still unbearded 
have a large share in deciding whether 
they will go to college, to a scientific 
school, to a store, to sea, or to a cattle- 
ranch. Their lives are staked on the 
wisdom of the step taken. Yet the Amer- 
ican mode of meeting these family prob- 
lems seems to our community, on the 
whole, safer than the English way of reg- 



g6 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

ulating them by tradition and dictation. 
The choice with heavy stakes of the boy 
who does not go to college is frequently 
set off favorably against the choices with 
light stakes of the boy who goes. Perhaps 
a similarly lenient judgment will in the 
long run be passed on the great stakes 
involved in group systems. I doubt it. 
I think it will ultimately be judged less 
dangerous and more maturing to grant 
a young man, in his passage through a 
period of moral discipline, frequent oppor- 
tunities of repair. 

Again, the practical difBculties of decid- 
ing what groups shall be formed are enor- 
mous. What studies shall enter into 
each } How many groups shall there be ? 
If but one, we have the old-fashioned 
college with no election. If two, we have 
the plan which Yale has just abandoned, 
a fixed undergraduate department main- 
tained in parallel vigor with a fixed scien- 
tific school. But in conceding the claims 
of variety even to this degree, we have 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 97 

treated the fundamental differences be- 
tween man and man as worthy, not repre- 
hensible ; and can we say that the proper 
differences are only two ? Must we not 
acknowledge a world at least as complex 
as that they have in Baltimore, where 
there appear to be seven reputable species 
of mankind: "Those who wish a good 
classical training ; those who look toward 
a course in medicine ; those who prefer 
mathematical studies with reference to 
engineering, astronomy, and teaching ; 
those who wish an education in scientific 
studies, not having chosen a specialty; 
those who expect to pursue a course in 
theology ; those who propose to study law ; 
those who wish a literary training not 
rigidly classical." ^ Here a classification 
of human wishes is attempted, but one 
suspects that there are legitimate wishes 
which lie outside the scheme. It does not, 
for example, at once appear why a pro- 
spective chemist should be debarred from 

^ Andover Review, June, 1886, p. 572. 
7 



98 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

all regular study of mathematics. It seems 
hard that a youth of literary tastes should 
be cut off from Greek at entrance unless 
he will agree to take five exercises in it 
each week throughout his college course. 
One does not feel quite easy in allowing 
nobody but a lawyer or a devotee of mod- 
ern languages to read a page of English or 
American history.^ The Johns Hopkins 
programme is the most ingenious and the 
most flexible contrivance for working a 
group system that I have ever seen. For 
this reason I mention it as the most favor- 
able type of all. Considering its purposes, 
I do not believe it can be much improved. 
As applied to its little band of students — 
Ii6 — it certainly works few hardships. 
Yet all the exclusions I have named, and 
many more besides, appear in it. I in- 
stance these simply to show what barriers 
to knowledge the best group system erects. 
Remove these, and others quite as great 

1 See the Johns Hopkins University Register, pp. 
47-53- 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 99 

are introduced. Try to avoid them by 
allowing the student of one group to take 
certain studies in another, and the sole 
line which parts the group system from 
the elective is abandoned. In practice, 
it usually is abandoned. Confronted with 
the exigencies of operation, the so-called 
group system turns into an elective sys- 
tem, with highly specialized lines of study 
strongly recommended. With this more 
genial working I have nothing now to do. 
My point is this : a system of hard and 
fast groups presents difficulties of con- 
struction and maintenance too great to 
recommend it to the average college of the 
future as the best mode of limiting the 
elective principle.^ 

Probably, however, this difficulty will 

1 I am assured that at the Johns Hopkins University 
a student is usually allowed to drop a course in his reg- 
ular group of studies and to substitute another of equal 
difficulty taken from some other group. No doubt 
this indulgence, as well as the privilege of taking extra 
studies, does much to mitigate the normal severity of a 
group system. 



100 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

chiefly be felt by persons engaged in the 
actual work of educational organization. 
The outer public will think it a more 
serious objection that grouped colleges are 
in reality professional schools carried down 
to the limits of boyhood. So far as they 
hold by their groups, they are nurseries of 
specialization. That this is necessarily so 
may not at first be apparent. A little con- 
sideration of the contrast in aim between 
group systems and prescribed will make 
the matter plain. Prescribed systems have 
gained their long hold on popular confi- 
dence by aiming at harmonious culture. 
They argue, justly enough, that each sepa- 
rate sort of knowledge furnishes something 
of its own to the making of a man. This 
particular " something," they say, can be 
had from no other source. The sum of 
these " somethings " constitutes a rounded 
whole. The man who has not experienced 
each of them in some degree, however 
small, is imperfectly planned. One who 
has been touched by all has laid the foun- 



THE NEW EDUCATION. lOI 

dations of a liberal education. Degree of 
acquaintance with this subject or with that 
may subsequently enlarge. Scholarly in- 
terest may concentrate. But at the first, 
the proper aim is balanced knowledge, 
harmonious development of all essential 
powers, avoidance of one-sidedness. 

On this aim the group system bestows 
but a secondary attention. Regarding 
primarily studies, not men, it attempts to 
organize single connected departments of 
knowledge. Accordingly it permits only 
those studies to be pursued together which 
immediately cohere. It lays out five, ten, 
any number of paths through the field of 
knowledge, and to one of these paths the 
pilgrim is confined. Each group consti- 
tutes a specialty, — a specialty intensified in 
character as, in order to escape the difficul- 
ties of maintenance just pointed out, the 
number of groups is allowed to increase. 
By insistence on specialization regard for 
general culture is driven into a subordinate 
place. The advocates of prescription main- 



102 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

tain that there are not half a dozen ground- 
plans of perfected humanity. They say 
there is but one. If we introduce variety 
of design into a curriculum, we neglect that 
ideal man who resides alike in all. We 
trust, on the contrary, in our power to hit 
some line of study which may deservedly 
appeal to one human being while not so 
appealing to another. We simply note 
the studies which are most congruous 
with the special line selected, and by this 
congruity we shape our group. In the 
new aim, congruity of studies takes pre- 
cedence of harmonious development of 
powers. 

I have no doubt that specialization is 
destined to become more marked in the 
American education of the future. It 
must become so if we are to produce the 
strong departmental scholars who illumi- 
nate learning in other countries ; indeed, 
it must become so if we are to train com- 
petent experts for the affairs of daily life. 
The popular distrust of specializing is sure 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 103 

to grow less as our people become familiar 
with its effects and see how often narrow 
and thorough study, undertaken in early 
life, leads to ultimate breadth. It is a 
pretty dream that a man may start broad 
and then concentrate, but nine out of 
every ten strong men have taken the op- 
posite course. They have begun in some 
one-sided way, and have added other sides 
as occasion required. Almost in his teens 
Shakespeare makes a specialty of the 
theatre, Napoleon of military science, 
Beethoven of music. Hunter of medi- 
cine, Hugh Miller of rocks, Faraday of 
chemistry, Hamilton of political science. 
The great body of painters, musicians, 
poets, novelists, theologians, politicians, 
are early specialists. In fact, self-made 
men are generally specialists. Something 
has aroused an interest, and they have 
followed it out until they have surveyed 
a wide horizon from a single point of 
view. In offering wider opportunities for 
specialization, colleges have merely been 



104 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

assimilating their own modes of training 
to those which prevail in the 'world at 
large. 

It does not, therefore, seem to me ob- 
jectionable that group systems set a high 
value on speciahzation. That is what 
every man does, and every clear-eyed col- 
lege must do it too. What I object to is 
that group systems, so far as they ad- 
here to their aim, enforce specialization. 
Among every half dozen students, proba- 
bly one will be injured if he cannot spe- 
cialize largely ; two or three more might 
wisely specialize in lower degree ; but to 
force the remaining two or three into 
curricula shaped by professional bias is 
to do them serious damage. There are 
sober boys of little intrepidity or positive 
taste, boys who properly enough wish to 
know what others know. They will not 
make scholars. They were not born to 
enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. 
They have another function : they pre- 
serve and distribute such knowledge as 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 105 

already exists. Many of them are persons 
of wealth. To furnish them glimpses of 
varied learning is to save them from bar- 
barism. Still another large class is com- 
posed of boys who develop late. They are 
boys who will one day acquire an interest 
of their own, if they are allowed to roam 
about somewhat aimlessly in the domain of 
wisdom until they are twenty-one. Both 
of these classes have their rights. The 
prescribed system was built to support 
them ; the elective shelters and improves 
them ; but a group system shuts them all 
out, if they will not on leaving school 
adopt professional courses. Whenever I 
can hear of a group system which like the 
old college has a place for the indistinct 
young man, and like the new elective col- 
lege matures him annually by suggesting 
that he take part in shaping his own 
career, I will accept the group system. 
Then, too, the public will probably ac- 
cept it. Until then, rigid groups will be 
thought by many to lay too great a strain 



I06 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

on unseasoned powers of choice, to present 
too many practical difficulties of construc- 
tion, and to show too doctrinaire a confi- 
dence that every youth will fit without 
pinching into a specialized class. 



POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS OF THE 
ELECTIVE SYSTEM. 



II. 

'T^HE preceding paper has sufficiently 
-■- discussed the impossible limitations 
of the elective system, and has shown with 
some minuteness the grounds of their im- 
possibility. The methods there examined 
are the only ones suggested by my critics. 
They all agree in this, that they seek to 
narrow the scope of choice. They try 
to combine with it a hostile factor, and 
they differ merely in their mode of com- 
bination. The first puts a restraining 
check before election ; the second puts 
one by its side ; the third makes the two 
inseparable by allowing nothing to be 
chosen which is not first prescribed. The 
general purpose of all these methods is 



I08 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

mine also. Election must be limited. Un- 
chartered choice is licentious and self- 
destructive. I quarrel with them only 
because the modes of effecting their pur- 
pose tend to produce results of a transient 
and inappropriate sort. The aim of edu- 
cation, as I conceive it, is to spiritualize 
the largest possible number of persons, 
that is, to teach them how to do their own 
thinking and willing and to do it well. 
But these methods effect something widely 
different. They either aristocratize where 
they should democratize, or they belittle 
where they should mature, or else they 
professionalize where they should human- 
ize. A common trouble besets them 
all : the limiting authority is placed in 
external and arbitrary juxtaposition to 
the personal initiative which it professes 
to support. It should grow out of this 
initiative and be its interpreter and reali- 
zation. By limitation of choice the pro- 
posers of these schemes appear to mean 
making choice less. I mean fortifying it. 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 109 

keeping it true to itself, making it more. 
Control that diminishes the quantity of 
choice is one thing ; control that raises 
the quality, quite another. How impor- 
tant is this distinction and how frequently 
it is forgotten ! Words like " limitation," 
"control," "authority," "obedience," are 
words of majesty, but words also of doubt- 
ful import. They carry a freight of wisdom 
or of folly, according to the end towards 
which they steer. In order to sanction 
or discard limitations which induce obe- 
dience, we must bear that end in mind. 
Let us stop a moment, and see that we 
have it in mind now. 

Old educational systems are often said 
to have erred by excess of authority. I 
could not say so. The elective system, if 
it is to possess the future, must become as 
authoritative as they. More accurately 
we say that their authority was of a 
wrong sort. A father may exercise an 
authority over his child no less directive 
than that of the master over the slave ; 



no THE NEW EDUCATION. 

but the father is trying to accomplish 
something which the master disregards ; 
the father hopes to make the will of an- 
other strong, the master to make it weak ; 
the father commands what the child him- 
self would wish, had he sufficient experi- 
ence. The child's obedience accordingly 
enlightens, steadies, invigorates his inde- 
pendent will. Invigoration is the purpose 
of the command. The authority is akin — 
secretly akin — to the child's own desires. 
No alien power intervenes, as when a slave 
obeys. Here a foreign will thwarts the 
slave's proper motions. Over against his 
own legitimate desires, the desire of a 
totally different being appears and claims 
precedence. Obedience like this brings 
no ennoblement. The oftener a child 
obeys, the less of a child is he ; the 
oftener a slave, the more completely he 
is a slave. Roughly to say, then, that 
submission to authority is healthy for a 
college boy, argues a mental confusion. 
There are two kinds of authority, — the 



THE NEW EDUCATION. Ill 

authority of moral guidance, and the au- 
thority of repressive control : parental 
authority, respecting and vivifying the 
individual life and thus continually tend- 
ing to supersede itself ; and masterly au- 
thority, whose command, out of relation 
to the obeyer's wish, tends ever to bring 
the obedient into bondage. Which shall 
college authority be ? Authority is neces- 
sary, ever-present authority. If the young 
man's choice is to become a thing of worth, 
it must be encompassed with limitations. 
But as the need of these limitations springs 
from the imperfections of choice, so should 
their aim be to perfect choice, not to re- 
press it. To impose limitations which do 
not ultimately enlarge the youth they bind 
is to make the means of education "oblige 
against its main end." 

This moral authority is what the new 
education seeks. To a casual eye, the 
colleges of to-day seem to be growing 
disorganized ; a closer view shows con- 
struction taking place, but taking place 



112 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

along the lines of the vital distinction just 
pointed out. Men are striving to bring 
about a germane and ethical authority in 
the room of the baser mechanical authori- 
ties of the past. In this distinction, then, 
a clew is to be found which, if followed up, 
will lead us away from impossible limita- 
tions of the elective system, and conduct 
us at length to the possible, nay, to the 
inevitable ones. As the elective princi- 
ple is essentially ethical, its limitations, if 
helpfully congruous, must be ethical too. 
They must be simply the means of bring- 
ing home to the young chooser the sacred 
conditions of choice ; which conditions, if 
I rightly understand them, may compactly 
be entitled those of intentionality, infor- 
mation, and persistence. To secure these 
conditions, limitations exist. In the very 
nature of choice, such conditions are im- 
plied. Choice is sound as they prevail, 
whimsical as they diminish. An educa- 
tion which lays stress on the elective 
principle is bound to lay stress on these 



THE NEW EDUCATION. II3 

conditions also. It cannot slip over into 
lazy ways of letting its students drift, and 
still look for credit as an elective system. 
People will distrust it. That is why they 
distrust Harvard to-day. The objections 
brought against the elective system of Har- 
vard are in reality not levelled against the 
elective system at all. They are directed 
against its bastard brother, laissez-faire. 
Objectors suspect that the conditions of 
choice which I have named are not ful- 
filled. They are not fulfilled, I confess, 
or rather I stoutly maintain. To come 
anywhere near fulfilling them requires 
long time and study, and action unim- 
peded by a misconceiving community. 
Both time and study Harvard has given, 
has given largely. The records of scholar- 
ship and deportment which I exhibited in 
my first paper show in how high a degree 
Harvard has already been able to remove 
from choice the capricious, ignorant, and 
unsteadfast characteristics which rightly 
bring it into disrepute. But much re- 
8 



114 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

mains to do, and in that doing we are 
hampered by the fact that a portion of the 
public is still looking in wrong directions. 
It cannot get over its hankering after the 
delusive modes of limitation which I have 
discussed. It does not persistently see 
that at present the proper work of educa- 
tion is the study of means by which self- 
direction may be rendered safe. Leaders 
of education themselves see this but dimly, 
as the papers of my critics nai'vely show. 
Until choice was frankly accepted as the 
fit basis for the direction of a person by a 
person, its fortifying limitations could not 
be studied. Now they must be studied, 
now that the old methods of autocratic 
control are breaking down. As a moral 
will comes to be recognized as the best 
sort of steam power, the modes of gener- 
ating that power acquire new claims to 
attention. Henceforth the training of the 
will must be undertaken by the elec- 
tive system as an integral part of its 
discipHne. 



THE NEW EDUCATION. II5 

I am not so presumptuous as to attempt 
to prophesy the precise forms which meth- 
ods of moral guidance will take. Moral 
guidance is a delicate affair. Its spirit is 
more important than its procedure. Flexi- 
bility is its strength. Methods final, rigid, 
and minute do not belong to it. Nor can 
it afford to forget the one great truth of 
laissez-faire^ that wills which are to be 
kept fresh and vigorous will not bear 
much looking after. Time, too, is an im- 
portant factor in the shaping of moral 
influences. Experiments now in progress 
at Harvard and elsewhere must discrimi- 
nate safe from unsafe limitations. Leaving 
then to the future the task of showing how 
wide the scope of maturing discipline may 
become, I will merely try to sketch the 
main lines along which experiments are 
now proceeding, I will give a few illustra- 
tive examples of what is being done and 
why, and I will state somewhat at large 
how, in my judgment, more is yet to be 
accomplished. To make the matter clear. 



Il6 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

a free exposition shall be given of the 
puzzling headings already named ; that is, 
I will first ramblingly discuss the limita- 
tions on choice which may deepen the 
student's intentionality of aim ; secondly, 
those which increase his information in 
regard to means ; and thirdly, those which 
may strengthen his persistence in a course 
once chosen. 

I. That intentionality should be culti- 
vated, I need not spend many words in 
explaining. Everybody acknowledges that 
without a certain degree of it choice is 
impossible. Many persons assert also that 
boys come to college with no clear inten- 
tions, not knowing what they want, wait- 
ing to be told ; for such, it is said, an 
elective system is manifestly absurd. I 
admit the fact. It is true. The majority 
of the freshmen whom I have known in 
the last seventeen years have been, at 
entrance, deficient in serious aims. But 
from this fact I draw a conclusion quite 
opposite to the one suggested. It is elec- 



THE NEW EDUCATION. I17 

tion, systematized election, which these 
boys need ; for when we say a young stu- 
dent has no definite aims, we imply that 
he has never become sufficiently interested 
in any given intellectual line to have ac- 
quired the wish to follow that Hne farther. 
Such a state of things is lamentable, and 
certainly shows that prescribed methods 
— the proper methods, in my judgment, 
for the school years — have proved in- 
adequate. It is useless to continue them 
into years confessedly less suited to their 
exercise. Perhaps it is about equally use- 
less to abandon the ill-formed boy to un- 
guided choice. Prescription says, " This 
person is unfit to choose, keep him so ; " 
laissez-faire says, " If he is unfit to choose, 
let him perish ; " but a watchful elective 
system must say, " Granting him to be 
unfit, if he is not spoiled, I will fit him." 
And can we fit him ? I know well enough 
that indifferent teachers incline to shirk 
the task. They like to divide pupils into 
the deceptive classes of good and bad, 



Il8 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

meaning by the former those who intend 
to work, and by the latter those who intend 
not to. But we must get rid of indifferent 
teachers. Teachers with enthusiasm in 
them soon discover that the two classes 
of pupils I have named may as well be 
dismissed from consideration. Where aims 
have become definite, a teacher has little 
more to do. The boy who means to work 
will get learning under the poorest teacher 
and the worst system ; while the boy who 
means not to work may be forced up to 
the Pierian spring, but will hardly be made 
to drink. A vigorous teacher does not 
assume intention to be ready-made. He 
counts it his continual office to help in 
making it. On the middle two quarters 
of a class he spends his hardest efforts, 
on students who are friendly to learning 
but not impassioned for it, on those who 
like the results of study but like tennis 
also, and popularity, and cigars, and slack- 
ness. The culture of these weak wills is 
the problem of every college. Here are 



THE NEW EDUCATION. IIQ 

unintentional boys waiting to be turned 
into intentional men. What limitations on 
intellectual and moral vagrancy will help 
them forward ? 

The chief limitation, the one underlying 
all others, the one which no clever con- 
trivance can ever supersede, is vitalized 
teaching. Suitable subjects, attractively 
taught, awake lethargic intention as noth- 
ing else can. An elective system, as 
even its enemies confess, enormously stimu- 
lates the zeal of teachers. It consequently 
brings to bear on unawakened boys influ- 
ences of a strangely quickening character. 
When I hear a man trained under the old 
methods of prescription say, " At the time 
I was in college I could not have chosen 
studies for myself, and I do not believe my 
son can," I see, and am not surprised to see, 
that he does not understand what forces 
the elective system sets astir. So power- 
ful an influence have these forces over 
both teachers and pupils, that questions 
of hard and easy studies do not, as out- 



I20 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

siders are apt to suppose, seriously disturb 
the formation of sound intentions. The 
many leaders in education whose opinions 
on election I quoted in my previous paper 
agree that the new modes tend to sobriety 
and intentionality of aim. When Profes- 
sor Ladd speaks of "the unexpected wis- 
dom and manliness of the choices already 
made " in the first year of election at New 
Haven, he well expresses the gratified sur- 
prise which every one experiences on per- 
ceiving in the very constitution of the 
elective system a sort of limitation on way- 
ward choice. This limitation seems to me, 
as Professor Ladd says he found it,^ a tol- 
erable preventive of choices directly aimed 
at ease. In a community devoted to ath- 
letics, base ball is not played because it is 
" soft," and foot-ball avoided on account of 

1 " Doubtless some have carried out the intention of 
making everything as soft as possible for themselves. 
But the choices, in fact, do not as yet show the exist- 
ence of any such intention in any considerable number 
of cases ; they show rather the very reverse." — Profes- 
sor Ladd in The New Englander, January, 1885, p. 119. 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 121 

its difficulty. A similar state of things 
must be brought about in studies. In 
a certain low degree it has come about 
already. As election breeds new life in 
teaching, the old slovenly habit of liking 
best what costs least begins to disappear. 
Easy courses will exist and ought to exist. 
Prescribed colleges, it is often forgotten, 
have more of them than elective colleges. 
The important matter is, to see that they 
fall to the right persons. Where every- 
thing is prescribed, students who do not 
wish easy studies are still obliged to take 
them. Under election, soft courses may 
often be pursued with advantage. A stu- 
dent whose other courses largely depend 
for their profit on the amount of private 
reading or of laboratory practice accom- 
plished in connection with them is wise 
in choosing one or more in which the bulk 
of the work is taken by the teacher. I 
do not say that soft courses are always 
selected with these wise aims in view. 
Many I know are not. We have our proper 



122 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

share of hardened loafers — "tares in our 
sustaining corn " — who have an unerring 
instinct as to where they can most safely 
settle. But large numbers of the men in 
soft courses are there to good purpose ; and 
I maintain that the superficial study of a 
subject, acquainting one with broad out- 
lines, is not necessarily a worthless study. 
At Harvard to-day I believe we have too 
few such superficial courses. As I look 
over the Elective Pamphlet, and note the 
necessarily varying degrees of difficulty in 
the studies announced there, I count but 
six which can, with any justice, be entitled 
soft courses ; and several of these must be 
reckoned by anybody an inspiration to the 
students who pursue them. There is a 
tendency in the elective system, as I have 
shown elsewhere, to reduce the number of 
soft courses somewhat below the desirable 
number. 

I insist, therefore, that under a pretty 
loose elective system boys are little dis- 
posed to intentionally vicious choices. 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 23 

My fears look in a different direction. I 
do not expect depravity, but I want to 
head off aimless trifling. I agree with 
the opponents of election in thinking that 
there is danger, especially during the early 
years of college life, that righteous inten- 
tion may not be distinct and energetic. 
Boys drift. Inadequate influences induce 
their decisions. The inclinations of the 
clique in which a young man finds himself 
are, without much thought, accepted as his 
own. Heedlessness is the young man's 
bane. It should not be mistaken for vice ; 
the two are different. A boy who will 
enter a dormitory at twelve o'clock at 
night, and go to the third story whistling 
and beating time on the banisters, cer- 
tainly seems a brutish person ; but he is 
ordinarily a kind enough fellow, capable of 
a good deal of self-sacrifice when brought 
face to face with need. He simply does 
not think. So it is in study: there, too, 
he does not think. Now in college a boy 
should learn perpetually to think ; and an 



124 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

excellent way of helping him to learn is to 
ask him often what he is thinking about. 
The object of the questioning should not 
be to thwart the boy's aims, rather to in- 
sure that they are in reality his own. Es- 
sentially his to the last they should remain, 
even though intrinsically they may not 
be the best. Young persons, much more 
than their elders, require to talk over plans 
from time to time with an experienced 
critic, in order to learn by degrees the 
difficult art of planning. By such talk 
intentionality is fortified. There is much 
of this talk already ; talk of younger stu- 
dents with older, talk with wise persons at 
home, and more and more every year with 
the teachers of the courses left and the 
courses entered. All this is good. Hap- 
hazard modes breed an astonishing aver- 
age of choices that possess a meaning. 
The waste of a laissez-faire system comes 
nowhere near the waste of a prescribed. 
But what is good when compared with a 
bad thing may be poor when compared 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 25 

with excellence itself. We must go on. 
A college, like a man, should always be 
saying, " Never was I so good as to-day, 
and never again will I be so bad." We 
must welcome criticisms more than praises, 
and seek after our weak points as after hid 
treasures. The elective system seems to 
me weak at present through lacking organ- 
ized means of bringing the student and his 
intentions face to face. Intentions grow 
by being looked at. At the English uni- 
versities a young man on entering a col- 
lege is put in charge of a special tutor, 
without whose consent he can do little 
either in the way of study or of personal 
management.^ Dependence so extreme is 
perhaps better suited to an infant school 
than to an American college ; and even in 
England, where respectful subservience on 
the part of the young has been cultivated 

1 As the minute personal care given to individual stu- 
dents in the English universities is often and deservedly 
praised, I may as well say that it costs something. Ox- 
ford spends each year about |2,ooo,ooo on 2,500 men ; 
Harvard, ^650,000 on 1,700. 



126 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

for generations, the system is losing ground. 
Since the tutors were allowed to marry 
and to leave the college home, tutorial 
influence has been changing. In most 
American colleges twenty-five years ago 
there were officers known as class tutors, 
to whom, in case of need, a student might 
turn. Petty permissions were received 
from these men, instead of from a mechan- 
ical central office. So far as this plan set 
personal supervision in the place of routine 
it was, in my eyes, good. But the relation 
of a class tutor to his boys was usually one 
of more awe than friendship. At the Johns 
Hopkins University there is a board of ad- 
visers, to some member of which each stu- 
dent is assigned at entrance. The adviser 
stands in loco parentis to his charges. 
The value of such adjustments depends on 
the nature of the parental tie. If the rela- 
tion is worked so as to stimulate the stu- 
dent's independence, it is good ; if so as to 
discharge him from responsibility, it unfits 
for the life that follows. At Harvard 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 12/ 

special students not candidates for a de- 
gree have recently been put in charge of a 
committee, to whom they are obliged to re- 
port their previous history and their plans 
of study for each succeeding year. The 
committee must know at all times what 
their charges are doing. Something of 
this sort, I am convinced, will be de- 
manded at no distant day, as a means of 
steadying all students in elective colleges. 
Large personal supervision need not mean 
diminution of freedom. A young man 
may possess his freedom more solidly if he 
recognizes an obligation to state and de- 
fend the reasons which induce his choice. 
For myself, I should be willing to make 
the functions of such advisory committees 
somewhat broad. As a college grows, the 
old ways of bringing about acquaintance 
between officers and students become im- 
practicable. But the need of personal 
acquaintance, unhappily, does not cease. 
New ways should be provided. A boy 
dropped into the middle of a large college 



128 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

must not be lost to sight ; he must be 
looked after. To allow the teacher's work 
of instruction to become divorced from his 
pastoral, his priestly, function is to cheapen 
and externalize education. I would have 
every student in college supplied with 
somebody who might serve as a discre- 
tionary friend : and I should not think it a 
disadvantage that such an expectation of 
friendship would be as apt to better the 
instructor as the student. 

Before leaving this part of my subject, 
I may mention a subordinate, but still 
valuable, means of limiting choice so as to 
increase its intentionality. The studies 
open to choice in the early years should 
be few and elementary. The significance 
of advanced courses cannot be understood 
till elementary ones are mastered, and 
immature choice should not be confused 
by many issues. At Harvard this mode 
of limitation is largely employed. Al- 
though the elective list for 1886-87 shows 
172 courses, a freshman has hardly more 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 29 

than one eighth of these to choose from ; 
in any given case this number will proba- 
bly be reduced about one half by insuffi- 
cient preparation or conflict of hours. 
Seemingly about a third of the list is 
offered to the average sophomore ; but 
this amount is again cut down nearly one 
half by the operation of similar causes. 
The practice of hedging electives with 
qualifications is a growing one. It may 
well grow more. It offers guidance pre- 
cisely at the point where it is most needed. 
It protects rational choice, and guards 
against many of the dangers which the 
foes of election justly dread. 

11. A second class of limitations of the 
elective system, possible and friendly, 
springs from the need of furnishing the 
young elector ample information about 
that which he is to choose. The best in- 
tentions require judicious aim. If studies 
are taken in the dark, without right antici- 
pation of their subject-matter, or in igno- 
rance of their relation to other studies, 
9 



I30 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

small results follow. Here, I think it will 
be generally agreed, prescribed systems 
are especially weak. Their pupils have 
little knowledge beforehand of what a 
course is designed to accomplish. Work 
is undertaken blindly, minds consenting 
as little as wills. An elective system is 
impossible under such conditions. Its 
student must know when he chooses, 
what he chooses. He must be able to 
estimate whether the choice of Greek 5 
will further his designs better than the 
choice of Greek 8. 

At Harvard, methods of furnishing infor- 
mation are pretty fully developed. In May 
an elective pamphlet is issued, which an- 
nounces everything that is to be taught 
in the college during the following year. 
Most departments, also, issue additional 
pamphlets, describing with much detail 
the nature of their special courses, and 
the considerations which should lead a 
student to one rather than another. If 
the courses of a department are arranged 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 131 

properly, pursuing one gives the most 
needful knowledge about the available 
next. This knowledge is generally sup- 
plemented at the close of the year by 
explanations on the part of the instructor 
about the courses that follow. In the Elec- 
tive Pamphlet a star, prefixed to courses 
of an advanced and especially technical 
character, indicates that the instructor 
must be privately consulted before these 
courses can be chosen. Consultations with 
instructors about all courses are frequent. 
That most effective means of distributing 
information, the talk of students, goes on 
unceasingly. With time, perhaps, means 
may be devised for informing a student 
more largely what he is choosing. The 
fullest information is desirable. That 
which is at present most needed is, I 
think, some rough indication of the re- 
lations of the several provinces of study 
to one another. Information of this sort 
is peculiarly hard to supply, because the 
knowledge on which it professes to rest 



132 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

cannot be precise and unimpeachable. 
We deal here with intricate problems, 
in regard to which experts are far from 
agreed, problems where the different point 
of view provided in the nature of each in- 
dividual will rightly readjust whatever gen- 
eral conclusions are drawn. The old type 
of college had an easy way of settling these 
troublesome matters dogmatically, by vot- 
ing, in open faculty-meeting, what should 
be counted the normal sequence of studies, 
and what their mixture. But as the votes 
of different colleges showed no uniformity, 
people have gradually come to perceive 
that the subject is one where only large 
outlines can distinctly be made out.^ To 

1 I may not have a better opportunity than this to 
clear up a petty difficulty which seems to agitate some 
of my critics. They say they want the degree of A. B. 
to mean something definite, while at present, under the 
elective system, it means one thing for John Doe, and 
something altogether different for his classmate, Rich- 
ard Roe. That is true. Besides embodying the gen- 
eral signification that the bearer has been working four 
years in a way to satisfy college guardians, the stately 
letters do take on an individual variation of meaning for 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 33 

these large outlines I think it important 
to direct the attention of undergraduates. 
In most German universities a course of 
Encyclopddie is offered, a course which 
gives in brief a survey of the sciences, and 
attempts to fix approximately the place of 
each in the total organization of knowl- 

every man who wins them. They must do so as long as 
we are engaged in the formation of living persons. If 
the college were a factory, our case would be different. 
We might then offer a label which would keep its 
identity of meaning for all the articles turned out. 
Wherever education has been a living thing, the single 
degree has always contained this element of variety. 
The German degree is as diverse in meaning as ours. 
The degree of the English university is diverse, and 
more diverse for Honors men — the only ones who can 
properly be said to deserve it — than for inert Pass men. 
Degrees in this country have, from the first, had con- 
siderable diversity, college differing from college in 
requirement, and certainly student from student in at- 
tainment. That twenty-five years ago we were ap- 
proaching too great uniformity in the signification of 
degrees, I suppose most educators now admit. That 
was a mechanical and stagnant period, and men have 
brought over from it to the more active days of the 
present ideals formed then. Precision of statement 
goes with figures, with etiquette, with military matters ; 
but descriptions of the quality of persons must be stated 
in the round. 



134 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

edge. I am not aware that such a course 
exists in any American college. Indeed, 
there was hardly a place for it till dog- 
matic prescription was shaken. But if 
something of the kind were now estab- 
lished in the freshman year, our young 
men might be relieved of a certain intel- 
lectual short-sightedness, and the choices 
of one year might better keep in view 
those of the other three. 

III. And now granting that a student 
has started with good intentions and is 
well informed about the direction where 
profit lies, still have we any assurance that 
he will push those intentions with a fair 
degree of tenacity through the distractions 
which beset his daily path ? We need, in- 
deed we must have, a third class of helpful 
limitations which may secure the persist- 
ent adhesion of our student to his chosen 
line of work. Probably this class of limi- 
tations is the most important and com- 
plex of all. To yield a paying return, 
study must be stuck to. A decision has 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 35 

little meaning unless the volition of to- 
day brings in its train a volition to-morrow. 
Self-direction implies such patient continu- 
ance in well-doing that only after persist- 
ence has become somewhat habitual can 
choice be called mature. To establish 
onward-leading habits, therefore, should 
be one of the chief objects in devising 
limitations of election. Only we must not 
mistake ; we must look below the surface. 
Mechanical diligence often covers mental 
sloth. It is not habits of passive docility 
that are desirable, habits of timidity and 
uncriticising acceptance. Against form- 
ing these pernicious and easily acquired 
habits, it may be necessary even to erect 
barriers. The habit wanted is the habit 
of spontaneous attack. Prescription dead- 
ened this vital habit ; it mechanized. His 
task removed, the student had little in- 
dependent momentum. Election invigo- 
rates the springs of action. Formerly I 
did not see this, and I favored prescribed 
systems, thinking them systems of duty. 



136 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

That absence of an aggressive intellectual 
life which prescribed studies induce, I, like 
many others, mistook for faithfulness. Ex- 
perience has instructed me. I no longer 
have any question that for the average 
man sound habits of steady endeavor 
grow best in fields of choice, Emer- 
son's words are words of soberness : — 

" He that worketh high and wise 
Nor pauses in his plan, 
Will take the sun out of the skies 
Ere freedom out of man." 

Furthermore, in attempting to stimulate 
persistence I believe we must ultimately 
rely on the rational interest in study which 
we can arouse and hold. Undoubtedly 
much can be done to save this interest 
from disturbance and to hold vacillating 
attention fixed upon it ; but it, and it 
alone, is to be the driving force. Meth- 
ods of college government must be reck- 
oned wise as they push into the foreground 
the intrinsic charm of wisdom, mischievous 
as they hide it behind fidelity to technical 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 137 

demand. In other matters we readily ac- 
knowledge interest as an efficient force. 
We call it a force as broad as the worth 
of knowledge, and as deep as the curiosity 
of man. " Put your heart into your work," 
we say, " if you will make it excellent." A 
dozen proverbs tell that it is love that 
makes the world go round. Every em- 
ployment of hfe springs from an under- 
lying desire. The cricketer wants to win 
the game ; the fisherman to catch fish ; 
the farmer to gather crops ; the merchant 
to make money ; the physician to cure 
his patient; the student to become wise. 
Eliminate desire, put in its place allegiance 
to the rules of a game, and what, in any of 
these cases, would be the chance of persist- 
ent endeavor ? It seems almost a truism 
to say that limitations of personal effort 
designed to strengthen persistency must 
be such as will heighten the wish and 
clear its path to its object. 

Obvious as is the truth here presented, 
it seems in some degree to have escaped 



138 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

the attention of my critics. After show- 
ing that the grade of scholarship at Har- 
vard steadily rises, that our students 
become more decorous and their methods 
of work less childish, I stated that, under 
an extremely loose mode of regulating at- 
tendance five sixths of the exercises were 
attended by all our men, worst and best, 
sick and well, most reckless and most dis- 
creet. Few portions of my obnoxious 
paper have occasioned a louder outcry. 
I am told of a neighboring college where 
the benches show but three per cent of 
absentees. I wonder what the percentage 
is in Charlestown State Prison. Nobody 
doubts that attendance will be closer 
if compelled. But the interesting ques- 
tion still remains, " Are students by such 
means learning habits of spontaneous regu- 
larity } " This question can be answered 
only when the concealing restraint is re- 
moved. It has been removed at Harvard, 
— in my judgment too largely removed, — 
and the great body of our students are seen 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 39 

to desire learning and to desire it all the 
time. Is it certain that the students of 
other colleges, if left with little or no re- 
straint, would show a better record? The 
point of fidelity and regularity, it is said, 
is of supreme importance. So it is. But 
fidelity and regularity in study, not in at- 
tending recitations. If ever the Harvard 
system is perfected, so that students here 
are as eager for knowledge as the best 
class of German university men, I do not 
believe we shall see a lower rate of ab- 
sence; only then, each absence will be 
used, as it is not at present, for a studious 
purpose. The modern teacher stimulates 
private reading, exacts theses, directs work 
in libraries. Pupils engaged in these things 
are not dependent on recitations as text- 
book school-boys are. The grade of higher 
education cannot rise much so long as the 
present extreme stress is laid on appearance 
in the class-room. 

In saying this I would not be under- 
stood to defend the method of dealing with 



I40 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

absences which has for some years been 
practised at Harvard. I think the method 
bad. I have always thought it so, and have 
steadily favored a different system. The 
behavior of our students under a regula- 
tion so loose seems to me a striking tes- 
timony to the scholarly spirit prevalent 
here. As such I mentioned it in my first 
paper, and as such I would again call at- 
tention to it. But I am not satisfied with 
the present good results. I want to im- 
press on every student that absence from 
the class-room can be justified by nothing 
short of illness or a scholarly purpose. For 
a gainful purpose the merchant is occa- 
sionally absent from his office ; for a gain- 
ful purpose a scholar of mine may omit a 
recitation. But Smith can be absent prof- 
itably when Brown would meet with loss. 
I accordingly object to methods of limiting 
absence which exact the same numerical 
regularity of all. College records may look 
clean, yet students be learning little about 
duty. Limitation, in my judgment, should 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 14I 

be SO adjusted as to strengthen the man's 
personal adhesion to plans of daily study. 
Such limitations cannot be fixed by statute 
and worked by a single clerk. Moral dis- 
cipline is not a thing to be supplied by 
wholesale. Professors must be individually 
charged with the oversight of their men. 
I would have excuses for occasional ab- 
sence made to the instructor, and I should 
expect him to count it a part of his work 
to see that the better purposes of his schol- 
ars did not grow feeble. A professor who 
exercised such supervisory power slackly 
would make his course the resort of the 
indolent ; one who was over-stringent would 
see himself deserted by indolent and earnest 
alike. My rule would be that no student 
be allowed to present himself at an exam- 
ination who could not show his teacher's 
certificate that his attendance on daily work 
was satisfactory. Traditions in this coun- 
try and in Germany are so different that I 
should have confidence in a method work- 
ing well here though it worked ill there. 



142 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

At any rate, whenever it fell into decay, it 
could — a proviso necessary in all moral 
matters — be readjusted, A rule some- 
thing like this the Harvard Faculty has 
recently adopted by voting that "any in- 
structor, with the approval of the Dean, 
may at any time exclude from his course 
any student who in his judgment has neg- 
lected the work of the course." Probably 
the amount of absence which has hitherto 
occurred at Harvard will under this vote 
diminish. 

Suppose, then, by these limitations on a 
student's caprice we have secured his per- 
sistence in outward endeavor, still one thing 
more is needed. We have brought him 
bodily to a recitation room ; but his mind 
must be there too, his aroused and active 
mind. Limitations that will secure this 
slippery part of the person are difficult to 
devise. Nevertheless, they are worth study- 
ing. Their object is plain. They are to 
lead a student to do something every day ; 
to aid him to overcome those tendencies to 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 43 

procrastination, self-confidence, and passive 
absorption, which are the regular and cal- 
culable dangers of youth. They are to 
teach him how not to cram, to inspire him 
with respect for steady effort, and to enable 
him each year to find such effort more 
habitual to himself. These are hard tasks. 
The old education tried to meet them by 
the use of daily recitations, a plan not with- 
out advantages. The new education is pre- 
serving the valuable features of recitations 
by adopting and developing the Seminar. 
But recitations pure and simple have seri- 
ous drawbacks. They presuppose a text- 
book, which, while it brings definiteness, 
brings also narrowness of view. The learn- 
er masters a book, not a subject. After-life 
possesses nothing analogous to the text- 
book. A struggling man wins what he 
wants from many books, from his own 
thought, from frequent consultations. Why 
should not a student be disciplined in the 
ways he must afterwards employ } More- 
over, recitations have the disadvantage that 



144 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

no large number of men can take part on 
any single day. The times of trial either 
become amenable to reckoning, or, in order 
to prevent reckoning, a teacher must resort 
to schemes which do not commend him to 
his class. Undoubtedly in recitation the 
reciter gains, but the gains of the rest of 
the class are small. The listeners would 
be more profited by instruction. An hour 
with an expert should carry students for- 
ward ; to occupy it in ascertaining where 
they now stand is wasteful. For all these 
reasons there has been of late years a 
strong reaction against recitations. Lec- 
tures have been introduced, and the time 
formerly spent by a professor in hearing 
boys is now spent by boys in hearing a 
professor. Plainly in this there is a gain, 
but a gain which needs careful limitation 
if the student's persistence in work is to 
be retained. A pure lecture system is a 
broad road to ignorance. Students are 
entertained or bored, but at the end of a 
month they know little more than at the 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 45 

beginning. Lectures always seem to me 
an inheritance from the days when books 
were not. Learning — how often must it 
be said ! — is not acceptance ; it is criti- 
cism, it is attack, it is doing. An active 
element is everywhere involved in it. Per- 
sonal sanction is wanted for every step. 
One who will grow wise must perform pro- 
cesses himself, not sit at ease and behold 
another's performance. 

These simple truths are now tolerably 
understood at Harvard. There remain in 
the college few courses of pure recitations 
or of pure lectures. I wish all were for- 
bidden by statute. In almost all courses, 
in one way or another, frequent opportu- 
nity is given the student to show what he 
is doing. In some, especially in elemen- 
tary courses, lectures run parallel with a 
text-book. In some, theses, that is, written 
discussions, are exacted monthly, half-yearly, 
annually, in addition to examinations. In 
some, examinations are frequent. In some, 
a daily question, to be answered in writing 
10 



146 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

on the spot, is offered to the whole class. 
Often, especially in philosophical subjects, 
the hour is occupied with debate between 
officer and students. More and more, phys- 
ical subjects are taught by the laboratory, 
linguistic and historical by the library. 
In a living university a great variety of 
methods spring up, according to the nature 
of the subject and the personality of the 
teacher. Variety should exist. In con- 
stantly diversified ways each student should 
be assured that he is expected to be doing 
something all the time, and that somebody 
besides himself knows what he is doing. 
As yet this assurance is not attained ; we 
can only claim to be working toward it. 
Every year we discover some fresh limi- 
tation which will make persistence more 
natural, neglect m.ore strange. I believe 
study at Harvard is to-day more interested, 
energetic, and persistent than it has ever 
been before. But that is no ground for 
satisfaction. A powerful college must for- 
ever be dissatisfied. Each year it must 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 47 

address itself anew to strengthening the 
tenacity of its students in their zeal for 
knowledge. 

By the side of these larger limitations in 
the interest of persistency, it may be well 
to mention one or two examples of smaller 
ones which have the same end in view. 
By some provision it must be made diffi- 
cult to withdraw from a study once chosen. 
Choice should be dehberate and then be 
final. It probably will not be deliberate 
unless it is understood to be final. A few 
weeks may be allowed for an inspection of 
a chosen course, but at the close of the 
first month's teaching the Harvard Faculty 
tie up their students and allow change only 
on petition and for the most convincing 
cause. An elective college which did not 
make changes of electives difficult would 
be an engine for discouraging intentionality 
and persistence. 

I incline to think, too, that a regulation 
forbidding elementary courses in the later 
years would render our education more 



148 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

coherent In this matter elective colleges 
have an opportunity which prescribed ones 
miss. In order to be fair to all the sci- 
ences, College Faculties are obliged to 
scatter fragments of them throughout the 
length and breadth of prescribed curricula. 
Twenty-five years ago every Harvard man 
waited till his senior year before beginning 
philosophy, acoustics, history, and political 
economy. To-day the fourteen other New 
England colleges, most of whom, like the 
Harvard of twenty-five years ago, offer a 
certain number of elective studies, still 
show senior years largely occupied with 
elementary studies. Five forbid philoso- 
phy before the senior year ; eight, political 
economy ; two, history ; six, geology. Out 
of the seven colleges which offer some one 
of the eastern languages, all except Har- 
vard oblige the alphabet to be learned in 
the senior year. Of the six which offer 
Italian or Spanish, Harvard alone permits 
a beginning to be made before the junior 
year, while two take up these languages 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 49 

for the first time in the senior year. In 
three New England colleges German can- 
not be begun till the junior year. In a 
majority, a physical subject is begun in the 
junior and another in the senior year. At 
Yale nobody but a senior can study chem- 
istry. Such postponement, and by conse- 
quence such fragmentary work, may be 
necessary where early college years are 
crowded with prescribed studies. But an 
elective system can employ its later years 
to better advantage. It can bring to a 
mature understanding the interests which 
freshmen and sophomores have already ac- 
quired. Elementary studies are not ma- 
turing studies ; they do not make the fibre 
of a student firm. To studies of a solidify- 
ing sort the last years should be devoted. 
I should like to forbid seniors to take any 
elementary study whatever, and to forbid 
juniors all except philosophy, political econ- 
omy, history, fine arts, Sanskrit, Hebrew, 
and law. Under such a rule we should 
graduate more men who would be first rate 



150 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

at something ; and a man who is first rate 
at something is generally pretty good at 
anything. 

Such, then, are a few examples of the 
ways in which choice may be limited so 
as to become strong. They are but exam- 
ples, intended merely to draw attention to 
the three kinds of limitation still possible. 
Humble ways they may seem, not particu- 
larly interesting to hear about ; business 
methods one might call them. But by 
means of these and such as these the 
young scholar becomes clearer in inten- 
tion, larger in information, hardier in per- 
sistence. In urging such means I shall be 
seen to be no thick and thin advocate of 
election. That I have never been. Origi- 
nally a doubter, I have come to regard the 
elective system, that is, election under 
such limitations as I have described, as 
the safest — indeed as the only possible — 
course which education can now take. I 
advocate it heartily as a system which 
need not carry us too fast or too far in any 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 151 

one direction, as a system so inherently 
flexible that its own great virtues readily 
unite with those of an alien type. Under 
its sheltering charge the worthier advan- 
tages of both grouped and prescribed 
systems are attainable. I proclaim it, 
therefore, not as a popular cry nor as an 
educational panacea, but as a sober oppor- 
tunity for moral and intellectual training. 
Limited as it is at Harvard, I see that it 
works admirably with the studious, stimu- 
latingly with those of weaker will, not un- 
endurably with the depraved. These are 
great results. They cannot be set aside 
by calling them the outcome of " individ- 
ualism." In a certain sense they are. But 
" individualism " is an uncertain term. In 
every one of us there is a contemptible 
individuality, grounded in what is epheme- 
ral and capriciously personal. Systematic 
election, as I have shown, puts limitations 
on this. But there is a noble individuality 
which should be the object of our fostering 
care. Nothing that lends it strength and 



152 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

fineness can be counted trivial. To form 
a true individuality is, indeed, the ideal 
of the elective system. Let me briefly 
sketch my conception of that ideal. 

George Herbert, praising God for the 
physical world which He has made, says 
that in it " all things have their will, yet 
none but thine." Such a free harmony 
between thinking man and a Lord of his 
thought it is the office of education to 
bring about. At the start it does not ex- 
ist. The child is aware of his own will, 
and he is aware of little else. He im- 
agines that one pleasing fancy may be 
willed as easily as another. As he ma- 
tures, he discovers that his will is effective 
when it accords with the make of the 
world and ineffective when it does not. 
This discovery, bringing as it does in- 
creased respect for the make of the world 
and even for its maker, degrades or enno- 
bles according as the facts of the world are 
now viewed as restrictive finalities or as an 
apparatus for larger self-expression. See- 



THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 53 

ing the power of that which is not himself, 
a man may become passively receptive, 
and say, " Then I am to have no will of my 
own ; " or he may become newly energetic, 
knowing that though he can have no will 
of his separate own, yet all the power of 
God is his if he will but understand. A 
man of the latter sort is spiritually edu- 
cated. Much still remains to be done in 
understanding special laws ; and with each 
fresh understanding, a fresh possibility of 
individual life is disclosed. The worth, 
however, of the whole process lies in the 
man's honoring his own will, but honoring 
it only as it grows strong through accord- 
ance with the will of God. 

Now into our colleges comes a mixed 
multitude made up of all the three classes 
named : the childish, who imagine they- 
can will anything ; the docile, so passive 
in the presence of an ordered world that 
they have little individual will left ; the 
spiritually-minded or original, who with 
strong interests of their own seek to de- 



154 THE NEW EDUCATION. 

velop these through living contact with 
truths which they have not made. Our 
educational modes must meet them all, 
respecting their wills wherever wise, and 
teaching the feeble to discriminate fanciful 
from righteous desires. For carrying for- 
ward such a training the elective system 
seems to me to have peculiar aptitudes. 
What I have called its limitations will be 
seen to be spiritual assistances. To the 
further invention of such there is no end. 
A watchful patience is the one great requi- 
site, patience in directors, instructed criti- 
cism on the part of the public, and a brave 
expression of confidence when confidence 
is seen to have been earned. 



University Press, Cambridge: John Wilson & Son. 









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